Personal Branding: How To Market Yourself With An Impact
Companies spend millions of dollars perfecting their branding. Marketing your business is a crucial factor in how customers understand your values and interact with the brand. More importantly, it has a lasting impression on the minds of your audience. Just think of Cindy Crawford and Coca-Cola or Shakira and FIFA. These images have endured for decades—shaping pop culture and the brand’s identity forever. This is all to say, we must have the same care and attention when marketing ourselves. How you brand yourself is incredibly important in your professional life, and whether you’re an entrepreneur, artist, writer, or engineer, you will need to learn the skill of marketing yourself—one that goes beyond having a website and an off-beat resume. To help get you started with the big and exciting world of personal branding, here are a few tips for marketing yourself to make an impact.
Have a Niche
Chances are that you’ve heard of the power of niches before. They establish a clear audience, streamline your presence, so you don’t get lost in the noise of content, and allow relevant customers to find you. However, you might not know that niches aren’t only in your work but how you present that work. For example, suppose you’re a designer. In that case, you might have established a niche for yourself by only working on projects that champion gender quality. The next step is to figure out how to convey that to the world in a similarly narrow manner. The easiest—and one of the most effective—way to do this is through social media. Suppose you have a pattern on your feed and you only share your new projects with a particular carousel format; your audience will begin to associate your method of content distribution with you along with your actual content. This ensures that you’ve left an impact on your audience—they remember what you do but also how you do it.
Get Out!
Unfortunately, incredible and consistent work isn’t enough when trying to build a brand for yourself. Along with a great portfolio, you must get out there and make yourself as visible as possible. Don’t worry; this doesn’t involve roaming the streets and handing out business cards to everyone you meet. Instead, attend every networking event, get invited to podcasts, host Instagram lives, make YouTube videos, post stories that encourage audience engagement, and collaborate with other people in your field. These are all methods by which you make yourself visible to an audience more extensive than the one currently focused on you. Though it might seem like much work, many of these can be transformed into habits that you do every day. For example, part of your morning routine can be updating your Instagram story with the book you’re currently reading. Eventually, you could even make a little book club out of this habit, creating yet another avenue for your audience to connect with you.
Listen To Feedback
If you’ve ever been involved with the higher-up management of a company, you’ll know that feedback sessions are one of the most important aspects of your brand. Many companies hire target groups to interact with their website/products and pay them for an honest opinion. Similarly, many agencies will review your entire body of work to give you feedback. Listen to what they have to say—and modify yourself accordingly. Remember that this doesn’t involve completely redoing what your brand looks like/what you stand for just because someone didn’t like it. The higher you grow, the more you’ll have to deal with unwanted opinions that feel destabilizing. Learn how to sift constructive feedback from trolls, and keep what they say in mind when you approach your brand. If you don’t have the funds to invest in hiring an agency, buy a friend a coffee and ask them to do the same. The rule is to be as honest and detailed as possible.
Have A Message
Your customers need to know what you stand for. One of the most significant aspects of personal branding is figuring out how to make yourself stand out from the rest. The most impactful way to do this is by having a clear set of beliefs, goals, and aims that you can share with the public. For example, you might be into candle making, but you personally stand for equal pay. To share this with your audience, include stickers in each package you send out that convey this. Having a message not only separates you from every other candle business but will likely encourage your customers to develop a deeper relationship with you because they know what you stand for. While there is always the possibility of alienating a group of people, you have to be okay with filtering out your audience. In a world as complex and opinionated as ours today, it’s impossible not to offend someone, so you’re better off offending people you probably wouldn’t get along with in any case.
Personal branding is something that will always be a work in progress. There is no quick way to set up a brand for yourself suddenly and never work on it again. It’s something that will change and transform as you do. So don’t approach marketing yourself as something that must be done. Instead, approach it as an opportunity for you to make a lasting impact on your customers and a way for them to know you better!
Always in your corner,
The Content Queens
