Creating a personal brand helps you stand out from the crowd of online experts. Here are 7 tips to brand yourself online and increase your visibility.
How can you brand yourself in a way that makes you stand out from the crowd?
The marketplace is more crowded than ever and you need to talk about yourself in a way that resonates with potential clients.
That’s true for employees, too. Leads that are from employees’ personal social media accounts are seven times more likely to convert than other leads.
If you look at thought and industry leaders, they have different ways to brand themselves. Mark Zuckerberg is known for his hoodie, and Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck shirts.
Gary Vaynerchuk is known for his hard-hitting style when he talks about marketing. He’s also known for generating a massive amount of valuable content online. He also engages with his followers constantly.
How can you build your own brand to become an authority in your industry?
Keep reading for the top ways you can brand yourself online.
1. Define Your Brand
The very first thing you need to do is to define your brand. Your brand is your promise to your audience. When someone looks at your name, what is the first thing you want them to think?
That’s the core of your brand and how you’ll create an emotional connection with your audience.
You’ll need to understand what your audience is looking for. Not only that, but you need to figure out who you are and what your purpose is. The key to branding yourself is aligning those two things with the problem your audience is looking to solve.
2. What Are People Already Saying About You Online?
You’ll want to assess what is already lurking on the internet about you. Do a simple search of your name on Google and a couple of other search engines to see what comes up.
Are there negative press articles? Maybe there are articles that are no longer consistent with your brand. If that’s the case, reach out to publishers and offer them an updated version of the article that reflects your personal brand.
Searching online doesn’t only involve articles, but images as well.
Maybe there’s a picture posted on a social media account in 2009 that shows up. If the images aren’t flattering, then you might be able to get them removed from search results. It might take a few tries, but you should be able to have them removed.
3. Create Your Brand Elements
When you’ve defined your brand and looked at how you stand online, you can create your own brand elements that visually represent your brand.
These include your logo, signature, social media profiles, images, business cards, and website.
You can look at companies and thought leaders for brand ideas. You can look to flower companies and notice how they brand themselves. Check it out for yourself.
Your personal brand has to have a message or a story. The message is how you help your clients transform their lives. The brand story puts them at the center of the story. They are essentially the hero of the story.
4. Be Authentic
Did you know that brand authenticity is a thing? In the corporate world, companies have a hard time living up to their brand’s values. Customers see right through that and the perception can damage a brand’s reputation.
It’s much easier for an individual to live up to their brand’s values. You just have to know what those values are. They also have to be true to who you are. You can’t say that you value something because you think that people will like you more.
Your audience is very savvy and they will see right through you. The important thing is to just be the person you want to become.
5. Build Your Community
You can’t be an authority in your field without having a community of people to talk to. To build your community, find the one or two top online channels where your audience spends time.
You can then build up your community in those two places.
For example, if you’re a travel expert who wants to help busy women get away from it all, you might want to consider a Facebook group or Pinterest page.
The way you brand yourself is to inspire women to see the world and experience life. You can then post items about travel experiences everyone should have at least once.
Your community will take time to build, but with consistency, you can gain a rabid following quickly.
6. Reach Out to Other Influential People
This may seem counterintuitive because you view other influential in your industry to be competitors.
You’ll need to change your mindset. You may be in the same industry and share potential clients, you and your competitors have unique qualities.
Reach out to them and see how you can work together to increase your brand’s exposure. Your competitor may even become a mentor who can show you how to brand yourself in your respective industry.
7. Be Consistent
Consistency is the key to your success. One study shows that 90% of people were successful because of a consistent brand message. That growth was a 23% increase in sales.
You need to be consistent in two areas. The first is message consistency. The second is in consistently publishing content that your audience will find valuable.
These two things require that you are organized in your messaging and in your publishing. It helps to create a content calendar with the topic you’re going to post about and where you will post.
Once you get an idea of what your followers respond to, you can then publish more of those types of posts.
Brand Yourself to Be an Authority
We all dream of being seen as experts on TV shows to share our story. That all starts with creating a personal brand that people can relate to.
You’ll need to do your research and get clear on who you are and why someone would want to pay attention to what you have to say online.
Once you do that and consistently publish content that people love, you’ll be a guest on TV shows and podcasts in no time.
If you’re ready to launch your brand, check out these tips to invest in online marketing.