Start your Digital Personal Branding Strategy | Growth Tools
DIGITAL MARKETINGBRANDING
A digital personal branding strategy is beneficial for you if you want to bring out the essence of your being that makes people want to know you and get in touch with you. Your personal brand determines the perceptions and impressions people around you form about you. And the emotions that trigger their behavior to want more from you – buy your product/service.
A personal brand is the face people see, meet, perceive and approach. Whether they identify with it or not, it’s just the work you put into making it remarkable.
A digital personal brand should reflect the same thing as the one you present in the real world. No distortion is beneficial if you want to build credibility, awareness and long-term relationships with your target market.
'People don’t buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.' Seth Godin
10 Tools every entrepreneur needs to grow an online personal brand:
Visual marketing platform for your social media accounts – Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest to plan, schedule and manage your posts, photo and video content. Later.com is free for individuals and allows you to upload and schedule posts, add photos from the web to your Media library, design the perfect Instagram feed, track and measure your posts.
Question-and-answer sites like Quora or Reddit. You offer your knowledge or recommend your product to people that are interested in similar products like yours or in your brand's expertise.
Landing page builder to design a responsive and expressive web page that best represents your brand and the product/service you are offering.
A well-structured and professional-looking landing page is the secret to driving quantifiable leads and boosting conversion rates.
To get here, analyze landing page metrics and extract data which you can process to get valuable insights. Thus you'll know which pages need improvement and develop content and visual elements that your audience enjoys. If you want sales, your users must feel a sense of familiarity and closeness to your brand.
Photoshop to design digital banners that are eye-catchy and produce high conversion rates. They can consist in persuasive messages around your brand promise, quotes from your experience, special offer for your target audience.
Audio recorder if you intend to create podcasts for your site or other digital channels. You can use the audio recorder from your laptop or mobile.
Laptop camera to produce informative and engaging videos about you and your product/service. You can then upload the videos on different social network platforms like YouTube, Facebook. Or embed them on your site or blog.
Teleprompter for vlogging, explainer videos, practicing speeches to have your script running and read your text like a pro whilst filming yourself or recording a podcast.
Digital Analytics to evaluate metrics and analyze data from your site or other channels. With Google Analytics, you can create an awesome on-site experience and social media presence.
Online Calendar to organize and plan out effectively your tasks and projects. And to let prospects and customers schedule time on your calendar. It is ideal to turn your personal branding planning into action.
Google alerts to know when your personal brand gets mentioned, by what source, and in what context. Once your personal brand appears on other sites, you'll receive by mail the link with the news about you.
Main steps to start with when it comes to building your online personal branding strategy:
Market research & analysis
As a driven person looking to build your personal brand, begin with market research. Thus, you learn about your audience size and behavior and competitors.
Through research, you will understand how your audience behaves and what are its interests. It helps you define your personal brand to make it helpful, informative, and socially responsible.
To identify the area(s) in which demand is high and your personal brand needed, try these free tools to perform the research:
• Statista
Competitor analysis
When you develop your personal brand, ask individuals about their interaction with your competitors. How do they feel about using their products, what are their advantages, how eager are they to recommend them to others.
Choose to take a concrete approach and prepare offers aligned with your visitors’ requirements that you don’t see at your competitors.
Targeting
Find your own targeting tactics and apply them across multiple online campaigns.
To target potential sponsors (B2B), look after companies in your area of expertise. Collaborations in the sponsorship market require professional and polished personal brands. You can become a promoter both for the product and the company.
Positioning
When people search for you or individuals like you and you’re not there, you lose ranking opportunities. And thus the occasion to offer your support to them.
Position and communicate very clearly your brand to the audience you want to inspire and share your experience and knowledge with.
Because simplicity lies at the core of your personal brand.
To build a strong position of your online personal brand, make sure to:
• be known for what you do and promote it carefully;
• be easily found online when your audience needs you;
• add value to your fans in unique and innovative ways.
Describe your personal brand objectives & goals
Now it’s time to add the objectives and goals you aspire to achieve as part of your digital personal branding plan:
To stay on track, follow the SMART rule that helps you better define your goals:
Specific: what results do you want to obtain?
Measurable: how do you know when you’ve reached them?
Attainable: how ambitious do you feel that you’ll achieve them?
Relevant: are these goals in line with your competencies, values and personality?
Time-bound: when do you intend to reach them?
To achieve your online personal branding objectives keep in mind the following aspects:
• create a great definition for your personal brand;
• decide on the targets that need your expertise, product or service;
• pick the most suitable channel(s) for your brand – website, social media, video, e-mail marketing, etc.;
• ensure your message (advertising, content, video) conveys how authentic, committed and meaningful your brand is.
And create content that’s appealing to your users because
...the content you create is the key to attracting your audience’s attention and engaging it.
Well, see below how you can develop brand engagement through astonishing and inviting content:
• highlight your story on your website, social media, e-mail or videos;
• get visual and produce natural video content that shows exactly the way you are;
• make live videos in which to provide inspiring and practical info;
• avoid writing fake or bumbling news that doesn’t reveal the real you;
• plan your content calendar; include in it the title of your materials, their format (blog post, podcast, ebook, video, photo, press release, case study, testimonial) and platform;
• post quality content when your audience needs it the most;
• find out what topics your audience is approaching;
• get involved in your community - create and manage groups – encourage your audience to like/share or leave their feedback;
• respond to mentions;
• track and measure your digital personal brand’s success to improve your content.
'Everyone has the power to be their own brand and a person’s main job is to be their own marketer' Peters
What to avoid when building your digital personal branding strategy
If there is one thing you want to avoid, it consists in promoting an image that doesn’t reflect the person you truly are. And for this reason, your true self demands to be uncovered and presented as it is in both the real and virtual worlds.
To get at this point, a personal and dedicated approach is desirable to get clarity on where you are and want to take your personal brand. Your personality, values, skills and passions, but also your network connections are needed when strategizing your personal branding.
When you become active in your business and the relationships you build with others, then all of these can become your precious gems. But not because the strategy says that you need to be in a specific way. But because the image you display is in line with who you truly are and what you mirror outside, is inside too.
Conclusion
A personal brand is not an online profile, slogan or logo. It implies merging your personal purpose with responsible and knowledgeable ideas and tactics that you put into action to serve the needs of people.
It’s important to find a balance when working on your personal brand and career. In fact, they should sustain each other. And paying more attention to one than the other could make you rethink your strategy.
That’s why a personal branding strategy can be efficient to make those two (personal brand & career) work together and not against each other.
Otherwise, you’ll reach a point where you’ll have to work on things that are not in line with your aspirations preventing you from moving forward.
Do you find this article relevant to your digital needs? Copy-paste this link and share it with your colleagues/friends/partners interested in online marketing. This way, you help them gain actionable information about digital marketing and us grow BeEMK – Be E-Marketing into a resourceful community. Thanks!