3 Things To Consider When Building Your Personal Brand
Building a business or brand is never easy. It forces you to research, analyze, and formulate strategies in the face of an ever-growing and ever-changing consumer market to define stand-out messaging and the “why” behind your brand’s purpose, as well as how that “why” can better serve your target markets.
Whatever your personal brand is, narrowing down its “why” – its reason for existing in the first place – is a crucial first step in building it into a winning business venture. After defining your brand’s “why,” and your vision for its growth, you can get started on creating a strategy that will reach more consumers and allow your brand to expand in the digital space and succeed beyond it.
With that in mind, here are the top 3 things to consider when building your personal brand.
1. Create Relevant Content
Many content creators who operate personal brands fall into the trap of creating, posting, and sharing content solely for the sake of outreach. This can be considered a “trap” because if the content is not relevant to the target audience, it does nothing to serve them or solve their problems. This holds true not only for the content they create and share on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, but also for the content on their brand’s own website or blog.
For example, if your personal brand is one that sells vegan, cruelty-free skincare products, the content on both social media and your website should reflect this and contain content that is relevant to the skincare industry. Rather than create and post content that is diluted by reaching far and wide into the general public, all of your brand’s content should include a portion of your vision and relevant industry messaging to attract a greater number of customers from your brand’s target audience.
If you are unsure as to how to make your brand’s content more relevant, start by drafting a “persona” of your brand’s “perfect” customer. Then, understand their intent, or the “why” in why that perfect customer would willingly purchase products from your brand over a competitor. From there, you can start refining your brand’s content to address that persona and other “perfect” customer personas similar to it.
2. More Likes With Less Work
One of the best ways to produce more content for less work is by sharing the content you post from one of your social media accounts to others. Whether it’s to your account’s story or page feed, the opportunity to repost and gain awareness from internet-based marketing is invaluable, and usually at little to no cost.
For instance, let’s say your personal brand’s primary social media account is on Instagram, followed by Facebook and Twitter or TikTok. By creating an image or short video for Instagram, your followers and other potential followers will begin engaging with your Instagram content. From there, you can cross-share your content to Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. This provides an opportunity to gain additional followers, which subsequently creates more organic traffic and engagement for your brand.
Do you see the pattern here? When this process is repeated consistently, you can create one piece of content for one of your social media accounts, cross-share it to other platforms, and rake in 3 to 4 times as many likes, shares, comments, and follows as you would from simply posting one piece of content to your account on a single platform. That way, you can start or continue building your brand with minimal hands-on work.
3. Engage Audiences For Feedback
While engaging with audiences for the sake of gaining more likes, shares, and followers is important, so is engaging with audiences to collect feedback on their perception of your brand, its content, and the products or services it offers. Engaging with your audiences for genuine feedback on your brand is a mutually beneficial process; it makes your audience feel more valued as a consumer and provides you with key insights into how your brand is perceived in the market and/or industry it operates in.
When consumers feel valued by brands who take their personal opinions into account, those consumers are more likely to share that brand – as well as its products or services – with others. Similarly, when brands allow consumers to provide honest feedback, it can shed light on certain aspects of the brand, such as prices being too high or issues regarding product quality. That insight from consumers can then be used as a learning tool to improve the brand’s decision-making and, thus, its performance.
By engaging with your audience to receive constructive feedback, your brand’s performance can rapidly improve and propel it towards the growth you wish to see.
