An employee is the organization’s most valuable asset because they are the one who makes the company stand, work and develop as a brand. Hence an employee as a whole represents the company as an identity.
In this article we will learn about the positive consequences that motivates to employ personal branding and how you can build your own personal brand.
What Is Personal Branding?
Personal branding is a journey more than an activity which includes individual promoting and marketing themselves and their career as brands. It’s all about how the world perceives them. It’s the perception about reputation, history, knowledge and expertise in the industry in which he/she is working.
Personal branding is somewhat different from corporate branding. Unlike corporate branding, it doesn’t promote the brand name of a corporate entity, rather it identifies an individual as a thought leader in the industry. It represents one as an influencer in his/her network.
Why Personal Branding And What Motivates Personal Branding?
The very first thing that comes in mind is– “Why should I involve myself in personal branding whereas I am already in a brand?” But don’t worry you’ll surely get your answer soon. Here are a few reason about why you should employ personal branding and I think you should really have a look through it.
- Help generate pragmatic PR: A representative of a company has the power of both enhancing and diminishing the image of a company and when it comes to career building where the person is willing to build one’s personal brand, the person gets the chance to showcase the fire and get the right people notice them. Not only this, but it gets the attention of competitors, customers and business media and gets them interested.
- Influence purchase decisions: Personal branding along with corporate branding makes you able to create the trust and esteem necessary to make more honest and authentic deal discussions. Everybody prefers, respects and loves to welcome the advice of a thought leader. A thought leader has the power to convert one’s prospect into one’s follower. Also when those followers consider a purchase, the thought leader’s individualized expertise will become a huge selling point.
- A Forte to your organization: A good and strong organization always looks for long-term success and hence they seek for thought and recognized leaders. The most essential role of building a personal brand is making yourself a forte to your organization as well as to other organization in the future. To help you achieve these company goals at promotional level, the size of online network is critically required.
Steps to Personal branding
Step 1: Define your online aspects/persona
The first and most important step to building personal brand is to define and to know yourself. Make sure about the subjects in which you have an expertise and know your areas of influence, since these are the factors that help you build a personal brand. You should have an image about how you want others to perceive you. Something that really needs to be considered is your background and experience level. You should start by building a genuine persona for others to engage with and share ideas that identify yourself.
Step 2: Customize your message
You should be very much specific when it comes to expressing your views. I mean, if you are posting a content then you should be aware of the topic and should understand what it’s actually about because one should always be rich in one’s niche.
Step 3: Recognize your audience
It’s easy to create content that the audience value, to determine where they spend most of their time and to reach them by targeting few of your primary targets to life. Recognizing your audience helps you know things that will help you spread your content well, gain visibility and website traffic.
Step 4: Discover social media platforms oriented with your goal
Before you start with promoting and posting content, do a little research about where your audiences spend most of their time and create your profile on that particular platform and convey your messages there. With your social media skills, start with top three channels. It would be better if you remain consistent with your posting frequency and engagement.
Step 5: Create content on a regular basis
Content defines you and that’s the reason you should publish content on a regular basis. Content contains information regarding your brand, your work, and many more. Your content speaks you and your influencing skill. This will help with your personal brand longevity and growth.
