Rustam K. Lead Designer

7 steps to building your personal brand

There's a good chance your own brand already exists. Although perhaps you haven't written it down yet. Your audience will create an opinion of you based on all the little decisions you make when communicating online and in real life.

To portray yourself in the way you want to be seen, it is crucial that you pay closer attention to your personal brand. A strategic approach to your personal brand will assist open the proper doors, whether you're a job seeker, a fundraiser, an aspiring creator, or really anyone who runs a life or business online.

Let's start.

1. Know thyself

As you walk through life, there are numerous questions that you may not have directly asked yourself. However, some of these responses contain hints for releasing your personal brand. This is a crucial stage in developing your own brand and sharing your narrative.

Take the interview in a setting where you feel most at ease expressing yourself, or ask a friend to conduct it on your behalf. Ask:

- What are you all about? Write down your hobbies and interests, desired industry or career.

- What excites you? What are you talking about?

- What adjectives don't describe you at all? What do you want people to not think about you?

- What are your defining characteristics? Ask friends and family to describe you and compare their answers with yours.

- What are your values? What causes or social issues are important to you? Are any of them central to your personal brand or goals?

- What is unique about you? This will help you determine your value later.

- What are your goals, short term and long term?

- What are your strengths? Is there anything you do exceptionally well?

- What impact do you want to have on your audience, on your business, on the world?

- How can your personal brand match your company brand (if applicable)?

2. Define your audience and focus

After getting to know ourselves, let's answer your why. Why are you building a personal brand? Do you want to get into the creator economy? Are you building a personal brand as an input to a business or product? Are you creating a professional public image that will help you secure funding or other business partnerships?

The answer to the why-questions will now help you define your audience. Are they clients, investors, employers, some other group? What does this group need? What is your value proposition? Basically, how does what you offer create value for this audience?

This is where you bring it all together to create a simple personal brand statement that reflects your value pillar, reflects your personality, and speaks the language of your target audience. Think of it as one part catchphrase and one part for yourself. One to three sentences can usually cover the most popular ones (bonus points if it fits neatly into the social biography).

3. Tell a story

Your personal brand statement is the starting point for telling the rest of your brand story. You'll want the short and long versions of your story in your toolbox to be used for a variety of purposes, such as social media, press kits, your personal website, or investor presentations.

The best person to tell your story is you, even if you're not a great writer. Tell your story in your voice first before working with a writer or editor to help you refine your draft. Remember that this is not a formal cover letter; the tone should reflect your personality. Go back to your know thyself exercise to remind you! Was stupidity one of your qualities? Make sure your story leaves the reader feeling the same way about you.

Brand storytelling principles can be applied to personal brands as well. You'll most likely start with a written draft of your story, but you can present it to the world in a format that best reflects you or is most appropriate for the platform you hope to get the most attention on. It can be a short or long video, a podcast/audio, a pinned tweet, or all of the above.

Creator and designer Alice Thorpe describes her personal brand in a short biography on the main page of her personal website and a more in-depth story on her About Us page, but her preferred medium and one that she uses to connect with her audience is video. Her biography is written in a way that tells viewers what to expect from her personality, which is captured on camera.

Visual storytelling for personal brands

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Choosing and creating visuals to represent your personal brand is just as important as your written story.

What colors or mood best reflect your personality? What tone should your headshot have: casual, fun, professional or artistic? Will you use a photograph or illustration? Are your videos raw and hand-shot or polished and filmed?

Work with photographers and designers whose portfolios match your aesthetic and clearly express your expectations (another great use for a flawless brand story!)

Visuals extend to the design of your website, logo, and other assets. If you're not a designer or developer by trade, there are plenty of free and inexpensive tools to help you create your own logo and website. The Shopify Themes store has a lot of options that you can customize to align your site's aesthetic with your personal brand and style.

4. Draw lines in the sand

The real you, your public personal brand, and your company brand can be deeply connected. But most likely there will be some differences. There may be aspects of your personal life that you choose to keep private and separate from your public personal brand. Or, in the case of some online authors who create vulnerable and unfiltered content, these two selves may be one and the same.

There may be other reasons why your personal brand is different from your true self. Privacy and security is the concern of online personalities whose work is prone to attracting trolls, doxxing and harassment. Decide how much of yourself you are willing to give. If you've built a business from your personal brand, linking your story to it will help you sell to an audience that's already interested in you as a person.

Your personal brand and your company brand are likely to have parallels and overlap. However, your business brand storytelling should also be geared towards your customers, their experiences, and their pain points. Tell your story and then mirror it to them.

5. Create and find a community

Building a community from scratch starts with a strong personal brand. We have already gone through years of quick gimmicks for social growth as audiences yearn for authenticity and meaningful connections online.

But building a community isn't just about growing your following. This is a two-way street. Your community only develops if the relationship is symbiotic and you, the brand, and the audience benefit in some way. Engage with your audience by incorporating their stories into your content by asking for feedback and participating in threads and comments.

Where you choose to set up your home base for your brand will depend on a number of factors:

1. What way of expression is most convenient for you? Brief writing, live video streaming, short pre-recorded video?

2. On which platform do you already have a small number of followers?

3. And most importantly, where does the desired audience hang out?

If you are a brand of one, then focusing your efforts on one platform may be the most sustainable at first, but eventually you will need to expand your audience to other areas. Hugo Amsellem of Jellysmack tells us that cross-platform audience overlap for some top writers is in the range of roughly 10% to 20%.

6. Be consistent across all channels

Remember that when you interact and communicate across platforms and audiences, your message cannot simply be Copy & Paste. Understand the nuances of language and format expected by audiences on each platform and tailor your content accordingly while staying true to your personal brand (tone, language, values, etc.).

7. Create content and appreciate

A solid content marketing strategy can help you grow your personal brand and drive traffic to your website. However, a long-term content strategy should include continuing to create value for your community in order to maintain loyalty and build long-term relationships.

SOKO GLAM founder Charlotte Cho created her personal brand before launching a Korean skincare brand. During this time, she has written content that has helped her readers embark on her personal skincare journey as well as help them discover products.

By the time she launched SOKO GLAM, Charlotte had already established herself as a knowledgeable source for skincare materials and was easily converting fans of her personal brand into customers of her business.

On the SOKO GLAM website, Charlotte's original mission of education pervades the brand's history as it intertwines with her own.

Get a creative brand asset as a bonus