Having a personal brand involves creating a distinctive niche for ones-self in the person’s area of specialty. This assertion above is true and can easily be noticed in the lives of celebrity personal brand examples we see today.
This article promises to help you understand what personal branding is, and that will be done with notable examples.
According to Wikipedia, millions have advanced their careers by creating a formidable brands for themselves. This has improved their businesses and driven more customers to their waiting arms.
As agreed, we’d be giving you vivid examples of personal brands. But before we get into that, let’s understand what personal branding is all about.
Table of contents
- What Is A Personal Branding?
- Why Is Personal Branding Important?
- How Can I Improve My Personal Brand?
- How To Build Your Personal Brand?
- Be Original:
- A Personal Brand Example:
- Consistently Create Content :
- A Personal Brand Example:
- Provide Value:
- A personal Brand Example:
- Network:
- Become A Creator:
- A Personal Brand Example
- Become an expert in your area of specialty:
- A Personal Brand Example:
- Stand out:
- A Personal brand example
- Be Social:
- A personal brand example
- Conclusion:
- Recommendation:
What Is A Personal Branding?
Personal branding according to Wikipedia is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual. You can do this by positioning them as an authority in their industry.
This helps to elevate their credibility and differentiate them from the competition. It will ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact.
The process of personal branding involves finding your uniqueness, building a reputation on the things you want to be known for, and then allowing yourself to be known for them. Ultimately, the goal is to create something that conveys a message, and that can be monetized.
It’s about taking responsibility for how you present yourself. If you strive to position yourself as an expert or become an influencer within your niche, self-branding can help increase your reputation as a leader.
By showcasing unique character traits and having an active presence online, you can work towards building a brand for yourself that resonates with people all over the world.
Meanwhile, do not confuse Personal brands with A person’s business or company.
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Why Is Personal Branding Important?
Today’s business world has become very competitive that one must create a niche for him or herself to get ahead of competitors. It accords credibility and distinguishes whatever you do as a business.
Creating your own brand will help recruiters find you easily when your service is required. Your brand is your online portfolio and must be guarded jealously.
If you’re a person of influence, having a brand attached to your person would expose you to more opportunities and help you form new partnerships.
If you have a personal brand and are looking for businesses to build around it see
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How Can I Improve My Personal Brand?
If you already have a brand, then what you need to know, is how you’ll keep improving your brand. To do this, ensure you get feedback and see that your brand aligns with your personal branding statement.
These Steps Would Help Improve Your Brand:
1. Create A Good Personal Branding Statement:
Identify and define your audience and audit your competitor.
2. Build a branding strategy:
You need a special branding strategy or style that suits you. The strategy might include your method of engaging your audience or defining your success rates within a time frame.
3. Ensure Monitor Engagement:
While engaging your audience to monitor the growth of your brand, promote positive participation, but always have a line of action for negative comments.
4. Develop Your Brand:
You can share your person branding on social media networking outreach and even speaking opportunities. Use any means available that will make your audience consume content quickly to introduce your brand even if it means to vBlog or Podcast.
5. Create A Communication Plan:
You cannot afford to spend all your time online; hence, a communication plan should suffice. This will help you easily provide information to partners and also know how to deal with the negative backlash.
6. Evaluate Your Success Regularly:
Keeping track of your progress and setting targets would help you know if your brand is growing or not. Be glad for every right step you take towards creating your personal brand.
If however, you are not entirely sure of to how to build your brand, check out these tips:
How To Build Your Personal Brand?
Be Original:
To excel in personal brand building, you must be yourself, there’s absolutely no need to do it like someone else. You have your set of qualities that makes you unique, build your brand around those qualities.
Your originality can be from your sense or style of dressing, the way, and manner in which you talk to your audience. Whatever it is, find it and explore it!!
A Personal Brand Example:
Elon Musk. Unlike most entrepreneurs, he continues to be very vocal in the social media space.
While others shy away from the fear of doing or saying things that might hurt their business, he enjoys a wholly unique atmosphere because he has successfully built a brand different from his businesses. And he continues to do unconventional stuff like sending a tesla into space.
He is one of the few people that successfully separated his personal brand from his business, while still leveraging on both to grow his business.
Consistently Create Content :
You can do this by starting a personal branding blog. It might be difficult in the beginning, but as you continue to churn out content, you will create a “voice” that’d be easily recognized.
This personal branding strategy will require the most upfront work but will ultimately be the most rewarding.
A Personal Brand Example:
Rachel Parcell started building her personal brand with her blog Pink Peonies. On her blog, she writes about fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. She’s been in the fashion blogging space for years and has built up a reputation as an influencer.
As a result, she currently has amassed over 973,000 followers on Instagram alone.
Provide Value:
Creating values means doing something that would benefit your audience. If for example, you are trying to create a personal brand in the fashion industry, you can start off by showing casing different styles and modeling them for people to see.
In the long run, your audience would know you for this, and would most likely buy from you when you eventually start selling fashion products. This would happen because they’d remember the times you helped and taught them something new.
A personal Brand Example:
Imi Ikonn’s personal branding strategy is all about providing value. She rose to fame with her YouTube channel for her Luxy Hair brand. In her videos, she’d create hair tutorials that people can follow along with. She subtly shows her hair extensions in her videos without making them the focus of it.
Occasionally, she’d create videos about hair extensions but even then the focus centered on value-based content like how to pick the right color and how to clip them in. It’s unsurprising that she’s currently built a following of 3.1 million subscribers. Now that’s how you build an effective personal brand.
Network:
When you start off your blog, put yourself out there. Go for meetups, mingle with people at conventions, post daily on social media, walk up to a stranger, and strike off conversations. Interacting with more people would widen your network, help you learn new things, and gain new perspectives.
Become A Creator:
You can build your personal brand by having a business that can easily be recognized as yours whenever your brand is mentioned. People would like to see you create or do something that can easily be attributed to you.
It is not enough to make social media posts or attend events, start-up or YouTube channel, create an online store, this really helps build your brand.
A Personal Brand Example
Manny Gutierrez’s. He’s a beauty influencer on YouTube who creates makeup tutorials on his channel. If you check out his Instagram account, you’ll see that most pictures are of up-close makeup looks.
Noticeably, most of the makeup is more dramatic with vibrant colors that have that extra pop. So makeup lovers who are looking for a more dramatic look would likely follow his Instagram account and subscribe to his YouTube channel to try out a similar style.
He also has an online store called Manny Mua allowing him to better monetize his YouTube channel. You’ll notice that a couple of t-shirts and a pop socket has some vulgar language on them. That’s likely because he often swears on his YouTube videos which maintain the consistency of how he communicates even throughout his products.
Become an expert in your area of specialty:
It’s difficult to build a personal brand when you know nothing about the niche you’d like to build your personal brand on. If you are love fashion, you should at least learn basic ways to sew.
It’s a lot easier to build your brand around the things you know than things you have no idea about.
A Personal Brand Example:
Michelle Phan; before Michelle Phan started self-branding on YouTube, she was an art major at an art school. She applied her degree to makeup artistry and quickly built up a loyal following on YouTube where she’d host makeup tutorials.
Eventually, she stopped creating YouTube videos and focused on her brands. She co-founded and created two brands: Ipsy and EM Cosmetics. Considering her experience with makeup tutorials moving into creating makeup brands made sense for her career.
Stand out:
You must amplify yourself in what you do. There is a lot of other people in your area of expertise, so if you must make a difference, then you must stand out. Amplifying yourself is where you take the essence of who you are and run wild with it. For example, say you’re a risk-taker.
If you want to build a personal brand around how you love taking risks, you might create the content of you doing a bunch of daredevil activities.
However, you mustn’t do something too extreme, but you can stuff that an average person would never do.
A Personal brand example
Robby Leonard, he teaches you how to stand out from the Crowd
Robby Leonard’s interactive resume is one of the most striking personal brand examples that really shows how to stand out from the crowd. By looking at his personal website, you can easily guess what he does for a living, without it being clearly stated anywhere.
As a graphic designer, he can showcase his skills by… designing his website to look like an interactive resume/video game. It’s entertaining. It’s branded. And it stands out from the crowd.
Most people who have built a reasonable personal brand gets on a high horse and forget the days of their humble beginning. They stop interacting with fans and limit how much they socialize. You don’t have to do that.
If you’re just starting your self-branding, you probably want to respond to messages from your followers. It’s just good for business. Interact with your followers on social media.
If someone tags you in a post? Respond to it. Was one of your articles shared on social media? Thank them. Does a customer have a question about your product? Answer them. Humanize your personal brand.
A personal brand example
Eric Bandholz, the founder of Beard Brand, actually engages with his followers on social media. While he may not respond to DMs on Instagram, he does respond to public comments despite having over 26k followers. You’ll also occasionally find messages from him on his brand’s YouTube channel.
Conclusion:
Remember how you always wish you were in the shoes of some influencers, well, you too can be like that. However, to build your personal brand, do not use negative strategies that would backfire.
Be intentional and original in doing things that would help you create a formidable brand.
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