How To Build A Personal Brand in 2020

A personal brand is incredibly important in 2020, and an asset that is easily leverageable. Of course, direct marketing, social media marketing, and all other marketing methods will improve the chances of business success, but a personal brand is the cherry on top that allows your business to stand the test of time and create long-lasting relationships with your target audience. 

#1 Assess

What this means is taking a step back and looking at yourself and your business and your brand objectively and taking a bird’s eye view. The odds are good that you probably already have some kind of brand or some kind of style that you maybe just haven’t fully articulated. After all, take a look through your closet, does it all follow a similar sort of style? Or take a look at how you talk. Do you tend to use the same words or phrases over and over again? Or ask some friends and family members about how they would describe you and what words you often use in conversation. You see, when you take a look at your wardrobe and your style and your patterns of speech and behaviours, etc., all of that contributes to your personal brand. And the odds are good, it’s already somewhat formed. Sure, you may want to make some tweaks and may want to adjust/change in the future. But taking stock of where you’re at right now is really important to build that foundation and make sure that what you build on is authentic and sustainable, because the last thing you want to do is build a personal brand around something that doesn’t resonate with you.  

The final tip in the assess phase is to write down your strengths and what makes you unique or different from other people. You see, when building a personal brand the last thing you want to do is to bring up weaknesses; rather, we want to take our strengths and what makes us different and then amplify those. 

Your goals with personal branding should become about 110% of what you already are. So take what you are and then amplify it. 

#2 Model

Now the key here is to research and dig in into what others that you want to emulate, or others that you look up to, and see what they’re doing and then find the things that resonate with you and work with your brand. So make a list of some influencers or celebrities and find the areas of them that you like or that you want to emulate. Now the key here is we don’t want to copy them, because they are unique and they are their own person. Rather, what we want to do is find the parts we admire or aspire to and start incorporating some of those elements into our brand.

Again, do not copy here. What you want to do is use them as inspiration to draw from… that’s it! Anytime someone copies someone else’s brand verbatim or takes in what they’re doing, they just come off as a knock-off or a second rate version of that person, rather than their true unique self. So don’t do that!

#3 Rule of One

What this means is one theme, one offer, and one channel. So, when we’re talking about theme, what we are talking about is ‘what are you known for?’. So if you’re just starting a personal brand, it’s going to be tough to be known for food andfashion andhealth etc.. Rather, you want to pick just one. For example, my personal brand is just marketing – although I have other interests, I want to be known for marketing (and so this is what my personal brand is all about).

One offer. You see, the odds are good if you’re creating a personal brand it’s to probably try to promote or sell something at some point in the future. My advice here is to stick with one clear and compelling offer. So, make it really clear what you do, who you do it for, and how they can buy from you. Don’t confuse and don’t overwhelm by going with too many different themes and different offers. You will just lose people, because when you try and please everyone you please nobody.

One channel. What this means is really doubling down on one social media channel and mastering that before moving on to other areas. The last thing you want to do when it comes to social media is sporadically post on a dozen different channels. Rather you want to find where your strengths are and where you’re uniquely positioned to deliver your message, and then double down there. Once you’ve got that nailed, of course you can start leveraging other channels. But, start with one!

#4 Publish

You see, when it comes to building a personal brand, people are going to need to understand what you stand for. The best way to do this is to publish valuable content. Just like I mentioned in the last step, you want to stick with your one theme and your one offer and your one channel, so really double down there and create content specific to that. If you can create daily content, that’s fantastic. But weekly content should be okay to get you started. Just don’t let it become monthly content; this isn’t a great way to build a personal brand… especially not quickly. So focus on creating content that best resonates and best communicates your message, and it’ll really help to secure and build that foundation for your brand

#5 Consistency

When it comes to building a personal brand, everything matters. What you wear, what you say, and what you do… all of this contributes to forming your overall personal brand. So you need to be consistent, you need to be clear and you need to maintain it across all your different touch points. If you don’t do this, every time someone comes across your content they will have to relearn what you’re about and try and figure out who you are (and whether or not they saw you before). In short, they will lose all of that previous brand recognition that you’ve worked so hard to build. Not only that, when you’re clear and consistent across all of your branding, people will start to learn what to expect and you’ll either attract or repel different parts of your audience, which is exactly what you want

So be clear and be consistent all the time. Because again, everything matters.