In order to know how to brand yourself, you first must know what a brand is and what it should do. Who are you? Your brand should clearly deliver the answer to that exact question. Your brand connects you to your consumers and creates credibility of you as an entity as well as creates motivation and loyalty in your customer base. The Balance says that if a brand could speak it would say "I am____. I exist because____. If you relate to who I am and why I exist you might like me, you can buy me, and you can tell others about me." This is a great way to think about the end goal of what your brand should be and do. Now that we've established what a brand is, lets delve into how exactly you should go about branding yourself.
Take Some Time to Focus on Yourself
The first thing you should do when creating your brand is gain an understanding of who you are. It is imperative that you have a clear and concise understanding of who you are and what you do. This is the foundation that you are going to be building your brand upon, so take the time to be sure that you're building it on concrete and not sand. Define set goals and objectives that you seek to achieve through your branding.
Steal Some Beta
Now that you know who you are and who you want to be, do some research and find others in your field that have successfully branded themselves. What worked for them? What didn't? Why did it work? Use the best techniques out of what you find and apply them to yourself.
Things to be Wary of
You’ll need to assess where you’re at now before you begin to make progress towards where you want to be. You’ll need to know what your current brand is. Do people know you? How do they perceive you? How vast is the difference between how you’re perceived currently and how you want to be perceived after your branding efforts? If the gap between where you are now and where you want to be seems too large, consider setting more achievable intermediary goal. Work towards that goal, achieve it, then set your sights on your original overall goal.
A Video is Worth 1,000,000 Words (1 Video=1,000 Pictures, 1 Picture=1,000 words therefore 1 Video=1,000,000 Words)
When looking into which medium to use to get your brand in front of people, you should truly consider video. 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. YouTube has over a billion users that watch over 500 million hours of videos each and every day. 85% of the US internet audience watches videos online. These numbers are also continuing to climb. Brand yourself with video marketing to make the largest impact in the shortest amount of time. Video is also the best way to create a feeling of personal connection between your brand and your audience. It is as close as they can get to personally meeting you without actually doing so.
Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
After you’ve undergone your branding efforts, you need to check and see if they are working. If they aren’t you could be wasting your time, or even worse, portraying a brand image that is different than what is intended. The Balance has four questions that will help you do just this.
· Does your brand relate to your target audience? Will they instantly “get it” without too much thought?
· Does your brand share the uniqueness of what you offer and why it’s important?
· Does it reflect the brand promise that you are making to who you are targeting as well as to your internal audience?
· Does your brand reflect the values that you want to represent as a customer?
The answers to these questions should be simple. If you have to put too much thought into it, you need to reexamine your branding tactics. You should make your brand as simple and clear as possible. If it takes too much effort for your audience to figure out, you could lose them. Keep these questions in mind and check to make sure that you are continuing down the right path. You will soon build a successful brand that should be able to hold its own and stand the test of time.
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Sources:
https://www.inc.com/carbonite/brilliant-ways-to-brand-yourself.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2013/04/22/personal-branding-101/#6d24f34a297c
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonha-revesencio/8-tips-to-brand-yourself_b_6925090.html
https://www.thebalance.com/why-is-branding-important-when-it-comes-to-your-marketing-2294845
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/03/08/video-marketing-statistics
