6 Ways to Develop Your Brand’s Personality 1. Decide Who You Are, FIRST. Many brands decide who they are AFTER launch and tailor their messaging as things shake. Know Your Audience. If you know who your potential customers are, keep them in mind when putting together any. Knowing the difference between a company and their competitor is imperative in developing a successful brand. Keeping an eye on the competitors will educate the company about which branding techniques are working well. A mission statement describes a businesses’ purpose, vision and goals and helps create a personality for a brand.
- How To Develop A Unique Brand Personality Assessment
- How To Develop A Brand Personality
- How To Develop A Unique Brand Personality Examples
- How To Develop A Unique Brand Personality Traits
It seems like right now more and more people are choosing to free themselves from the corporate cage and start their own business, which is why in 2013 there was record growth for new businesses being started.
In 2014 alone, there are over 250 million blogs in existence and people are spending more time online than ever, being consumed by social media and online purchasing.
So you can see why it can be difficult to try and make yourself and your brand stand out online and off, and separate yourself from the “sea of sameness,” as Ash Ambirge so aptly put it.
There is a phrase I have heard over the years that really speaks to the notion of creating a unique business brand – “Don’t reinvent the wheel, just realign it.”
In a day and age when so much has already been developed and thought of, finding a truly genuine idea can feel next to impossible, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take a good idea and make it great.
So what’s the trick to moving from good to great? Your branding and voice, of course.
Over the past 4 years and counting, I have built a successful business based on a brand that truly represents myself and everything I stand behind. Every piece of content I publish and every product I create are all aligned with my core beliefs – or Painted Picture – and this sets me a part from others in so many ways.
1. Develop Your Brand through Your Voice
When I first started out in business, I had just come out of a very corporate job. As a result, my first blog posts were corporate too. Basically, what I mean by that is that although they contained useful information, there was a lack of personality; they were bland, maybe even on the cold side. I just couldn’t shake that corporate speak that I’d learned over years of being in marketing and communications roles.
It didn’t take me long to realize that my writing was lacking the passion I so clearly felt inside about my new venture. When I started to write from the heart and allowed my personality and voice to shine through, I found that what I was saying was resonating with my audience more.
Though this no-holds-barred approach came with spelling errors, grammar fails and a side of cheesy humor, it was me. More importantly, it was my Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or, as I prefer to call it, my Unique Special Ingredient.
Many people struggle with their USP because they are scared to try something different. That’s because we have been conditioned to do things the way we see others doing them. Once you face the fear of embracing what makes you unique, you can start to really cater to the needs of your customer.
A great example of this is my friend Maria Ross who I interviewed on my podcast. Maria is a brand strategist who also happens to be an actress and voice-over artist. When she was starting her own personal brand, others kept telling her to leave her acting behind because clients wouldn’t take her seriously.
Maria was smart enough to realize that what she had learned from her time acting and doing voice-overs was something she could actually apply to her brand strategizing.
Basically, what Maria did was help her clients identify what it is they wanted to do. What was their niche, who was their ideal customer, what services did they want to provide? After figuring this out, she applied her unparalleled ability for storytelling, which she learned from film, to help her clients really separate themselves from others.
Rather than rely on gimmicks or promotions to grab people’s attention, she used her USP to attract her clients’ audiences. What ended up being Maria’s special ingredient ultimately allowed her clients to find theirs.
Finding your unique selling proposition is essential, but after that you really need to consider your brand attributes so you can take it to the next level. What do you want to be known for? How do you want to be perceived?
A great way to pull all this together is by creating your own Painted Picture. A Painted Picture is a clear vision of where you want your business to be, but also how you want to be perceived. Running this by your friends, family, peers and co-workers can really help you iron out any branding wrinkles.
Is what you envisioned what others perceive? If not, keep working at it. If yes, that’s when the magic can happen. Once your vision matches others perceptions, you can really take the time to build your personality and voice to match. You want to make sure that everything you do, say and create aligns with this vision.
2. Stop the Comparison Game
Like I said above, finding our USP like I detail out in this post (which made me laugh cos I’m very much being true to my cheeky brand in it), can be a struggle because we are conditioned to do as others do, which also means we tend to compare ourselves to others as well.
One of the biggest mistakes of new business owners is that they see a brand they like and copy it. What’s special about that? The answer is simple: nothing! So please stop ripping off Marie Forleo’s website, people – I can’t tell you how many people I see copying it. Stop it NOW!
There are several reasons why people copy other people’s brands: there may be one or two facets of their brand that really resonates with you, or you see their success and think that by copying it you’ll achieve the same.
To avoid falling into the comparison trap, picture your top 3 brands and think about what draws you to them. Once you have figured that out, emulate the best, but make it your own because that is what your audience will resonate with.
Also take a moment to listen to one of my most popular podcast episodes all about this: [TSE 81] How To Stop the Comparison Game and Choose Yourself.
Friends of mine from Screwtheninetofive.com really loved Marie Forleo when they started building their online business. Did they go ahead and copy her website? No. Why? Because they knew that to really create a brand that would last, they would have to carve out a part of the market that was unique to them.
Instead of slapping their name on a lookalike site, they took this opportunity to design a website and business that reflected their tongue-in-cheek attitude and one that would exemplify what they stood for. In doing so, they created a brand and audience that resonated with what they were doing and were even acknowledged by their fellow entrepreneurial peers as creating something genuine and true to who they were.
How To Develop A Unique Brand Personality Assessment
Again, it all comes back to that Painted Picture – your vision – and standing confidently behind what you are doing. Of course, it can be easy to look at others doing well and want to be like them, but building a business from the floor up means living and breathing that vision, and you can’t live and breathe someone else’s dream.
3. Find and Capture Your Audience
Now that you are a little clearer on your personal brand, how do you find your customers and, more importantly, how do you capture their attention?
This is a two-step process.
Step 1: First, you must define who your ideal customer is.
Create your ideal customer avatar and be as detailed as possible. What age and gender are you selling to? What socio-economic status are they from? Does your ideal customer like spending weekends at the beach or do they prefer a quiet cottage in the woods with the latest mystery novel? What car do they drive or do they prefer a scooter?
Yes – be THAT specific! The more specific you can be, the more you will attract that particular customer and the more you can start to cater to their needs.
Step 2: Locate your audience and capture their attention.
Now that you’ve clearly defined who you are targeting, you can start to look for them on social media. There are several resources that can point you in the right direction and once you find them, set up shop and start using that unique voice of yours to capture their interest.
Jason Surfrapp is the perfect example of someone who knows how to go out and find an audience and capture their attention. Jason built his tribe by shocking them. With multiple name changes (he’s even gone so far as to sell his own last name!) and clearly identifying his target market every time he dives into a new project, he has been able to capture and enthrall.
I’m not saying that you need to go out and sell your last name to build your brand, but it worked for Jason and his audience has come to love and appreciate his unique approach. Plus, it keeps them coming back for more because they want to know what crazy, fun thing he’ll try next.
The key to this is consistency. Be consistent with your language, imagery and personality.
“Consistency breeds trust and trust strengthens your chances of success.” ~ Natalie Sisson
Perhaps this is the hardest part of building a personal brand because you must commit to the fact that not everyone is going to like you.
Not being liked can be a tough pill to swallow for many of us, but it’s reality and once you accept that, you can fully appreciate the audience you have developed and pour your heart and soul into giving them what they want.
What’s so amazing is that once you’ve determined your ideal customer, become comfortable with your voice and acknowledged your Unique Special Ingredient, your essence will radiate from everything you do.
Videos, podcasts, blog posts, tweets, etc., will all be a genuine reflection of your thoughts, beliefs, mission, vision and values, and that is what will keep customers coming through the door.
So go on, embrace your inner awesome and be true to yourself. You and your business will be better for it!
Full Disclosure: I am blogging on behalf of Visa Business and received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. Visit https://facebook.com/visasmallbiz to take a look at the reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business. The Page serves as a space where small business owners can access educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently. Every month, the Page will introduce a new theme that will focus on a topic important to a small business owner’s success. For additional tips and advice, and information about Visa’s small business solutions, follow @VisaSmallBiz and visit https://visa.com/business.
People often talk about wanting to improve their personal brand. You undoubtedly know what a business brand is – we refer to brands regularly whenever we discuss influencer marketing. But you probably don’t think much about having a brand yourself. The idea of “personal branding” is unusual to most people. But in this online era, where things, both good and bad, last forever on the internet, personal branding can be considered more important than ever.
Have you ever Googled your name? Obviously, you may find that other people share your name. But when you do see items that mention you, do they show what you want the world to see? Or should you “massage” your online record to make it more acceptable, and present you in a more favorable light?
For that matter, how do people perceive you offline? Do they connect you and your values with your business and the values it represents?
What is Personal Branding:
What is Your Personal Brand?
Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want the world to see you. It is the telling of your story, and how it reflects your conduct, behavior, spoken and unspoken words, and attitudes.
You use your personal branding to differentiate yourself from other people. Done well, you can tie your personal branding in with your business in ways no corporate branding can possibly succeed.
Professionally, your personal brand is the image that people see of you. It can be a combination of how they look at you in real life, how the media portrays you, and the impression that people gain from the information about you available online.
You can either ignore your personal brand, and let it develop organically, possibly chaotically, beyond your control, or you can help massage your personal brand to depict you as the person you want to be.
In the pre-internet days, your personal brand was really just your business card. Unless you were high profile in the media or somebody who featured strongly as the face of advertising, few people would have heard of you. In today’s highly public world, where every little action is discussed at length on social media, you are far less anonymous.
Why Would You Want a Personal Brand?
Your personal brand can be vital to you professionally. It is how you present yourself to current and potential clients. It gives you the opportunity to ensure that people see you in the way you want them to, instead of in some arbitrary, possibly detrimental, way.
It gives you the opportunity to highlight your strengths and your passions. It helps people believe they know you better, and people have much higher trust in those they feel they know; even pubic people they have never met personally.
This is particularly evident at election time. Portfolioashley danielle designs. While many people seek out candidates’ views on issues important to them, other voters have less interest in the process. Instead, they vote for a name they recognize. It comes as no surprise that candidates with strong personal brands succeed in politics, regardless of their political views or beliefs. Regardless of your opinion on Donald Trump as a president, for instance, you can’t deny that he has built a strong personal brand, which helped encourage many people to give their vote to him.
Why is Personal Branding Important?
You need to create a strong personal brand if you want to be considered influential. Your personal brand helps you stand out from everybody else. You can use your personal brand to demonstrate your knowledge and skills about your areas of expertise.
In many ways, your personal brand is what makes you memorable. It is your personal brand that helps you stand out from the thousands of other people like you.
Millennials, in particular, have adistrust of advertising. 84% of millennials trust neither the advertisements nor the brands that create them. Yet, they are prepared to believe people they feel they “know”– even the business people behind the brands they detest so much.
This has meant a major rethink about how businesses market themselves. Indeed this is one of the reasons whyinfluencer marketing has become so successful over recent years.
There has been a movement towards personalizing the main people in a business. Obviously, this is easy for a small business – there is little difference between a sole trader and his business. It can be more difficult for large companies. But some people manage it well. Steve Jobs used personal branding well before the phrase was even well known to distinguish himself as the face of Apple. Similarly, Elon Musk’s personal brand is probably better known than Tesla’s corporate brand.
It makes sense that any business owner or manager should bond with potential customers first on an individual basis before he or she tries to deliver the company’s message.
Considerations for Building Your Personal Brand
Creating a personal brand requires extensive self-reflection and introspection. It helps if you know yourself – which surprisingly few people do. Most people find it extremely difficult to describe themselves, although they often find it easier to explain how they want to be.
If your ultimate aim for personal branding is to improve the performance of your business, you first need to ensure that you know who your target customers are. You want your personal branding to match your targeted clientele.
This isn’t new. Business people have been doing this for many years, long before the internet. Think about the image that Hugh Hefner portrayed for virtually all of his adult life. He probably never heard of personal branding, yet he let himself become the face of the Playboy empire and lived the lifestyle that the readers of his magazine envied. He could not have lived his type of lifestyle, however, if he helmed a more conservative company, targeting more politically correct customers.
Ultimately you want to build a reputation as somebody who cares about the types of people that make up your potential and existing clients. It's crucial to find, listen and engage with your potential clients. This is where a media monitoring tool like Brand24 comes into play, which can help you monitor, be present and responsive 24/7. A crucial part of your personal branding is to make sure you come across as being human, with the same issues and problems as your target market. The only difference is that you can show that you have found a solution to some of these problems – which you are willing to share with others.
You don’t want to come across as being like a stereotypical used car salesman – even if you are in the automobile sales business. Cynical consumers see businesses as being all about selling. The whole purpose of personal branding is to step back and deemphasize selling.
Nowadays, you can’t ignore the importance of social media. Part of your personal branding should include having social media accounts on all of the social networks where your audience spends their time. And you will want to accept friend requests freely – you won’t want to set your accounts to private. If you really want to run a Facebook account just for your friends and family, you should consider setting up a separate one in a different name for this.
The Importance of a Unified Theme
You want your personal branding to be consistent. At all times you want to stay true to your brand.
This is not just a matter of you consistently behaving in a way that matches your portrayal – although that is important. It also includes factors more reflective of business branding. You will want to decide on a consistent color scheme and fonts. And you will want to use these color and fonts everywhere. They should be the same on your website, social accounts, business cards and anything else you have that is printed. If you represent a business, these should match the colors and fonts of your business.
You will want to look at everything you use publicly here. You should even look at things like the footers in your emails, your stationery, accounts and invoices, and any brochures you hand out. You might even go as far as buying a car that fits your preferred color scheme and wearing appropriately colored ties or other clothing to any public event you attend.
A Few Techniques to Build Your Personal Brand
Don’t forget the offline world. Your personal brand needs to encompass all the places where your customers could encounter you. Old-style business cards are just as crucial to your branding, as your social pages are. Just remember to keep your theme consistent on these.
Carry business cards with you wherever you go. This is as relevant now as it was forty years ago. Take out a card whenever you see the opportunity to network with somebody new who matches your target audience.
Ideally, you will want your personal branding to encompass all of your public life. So this even covers how you dress whenever you are in a public situation. I couldn’t imagine Donald Trump wandering down the street in old jeans and a tee-shirt, any more than I would expect a rock star to go shopping in a fancy suit. You want your whole public image to match the persona of your personal brand.
Your Actions Need to Match Your Personal Branding
The secret of successful personal branding is an underlying consistency. You are trying to establish an external depiction of “you.” This means that you need to act consistently with that depiction.
This is also the reason why the public can react very differently to the news of two people doing the same type of behavior. It is possible that an act that would shock them if done by the first person may be entirely consistent with the expectations of the second.
For instance, imagine the reaction to news that a particular politician took drugs. In most cases that would be the death knell on their political career – it would be completely incongruent with their personal branding and public expectations. On the other hand, suppose you heard that a heavy metal rock star took drugs. It would hardly be news. It would most likely tie in with your expectations, and may even enhance his reputation with his core audience.
The average person representing a small business probably doesn't have such extreme viewpoints about their personal brand. However, you still need to act in ways that match your perceived image. If you portray yourself as being caring and interested in your customers, then it is crucial that you do listen to their complaints and try and fix any problems they may encounter with your product.
Above all else, though, you do want your personal brand to be relatively authentic. Sure it may ignore a few of your personal warts, and you may have to massage it a little to match your target audience perceptions, but it needs to ring genuine. It is not hard to spot a fake person, living a lie of a life.
You want your personal brand to match what people say about you when you are not around. If people don’t believe your personal brand, then you face a distinct lack of credibility.
Free Personal Brand Health Checker
Verification on another Social Network
Wikipedia Page
Featured Press
Personal website/blog
How To Develop A Brand Personality
Contributor on another website
Is this username / brand trademarked
Is your Instagram account verified
*Tips :- Improve your personal brand by guest contributing to various publications and blogs.
- Apply for verification on social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.
- Create a branded website under your own domain name and act a a thought leader in your industry
- Join channels such as quora and regularly contribute to topics you specialize in
- Ensure daily activity on your social channels by interacting and joining relevant conversations in your niche
Followers
Engagement Ratio
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a personal brand?
Your personal brand refers to how you promote yourself. It is the expertise, experience and personality that you want everyone else to see about you. It can be a combination of how the media depicts you, the idea people get from the information they find about you online and how they perceive you in real life. You can use your personal branding to set yourself apart from others.
Why is a personal brand important?
A personal brand is key to your professional success as it revolves around how you present yourself to existing and potential clients. It gives you the chance to emphasize your strengths and passions to help set you apart from everyone else and make sure that people see you in the way you want them to see you. It also helps people to feel as if they know you better which helps to increase your trustworthiness (even if they have not even met you in person).
How do you start to build your personal brand?
How To Develop A Unique Brand Personality Examples
Introspection and self-reflection are important when creating a personal brand. If you want to create a personal brand to boost the performance of your business, you first need to ensure that you understand your target audience. At the end of the day, you want to create a reputation as someone who cares about your current and potential clients and also battles with the same problems. Though, the difference that you want to emphasize is that you have identified an answer to some of these issues.
Are business cards still important?
Traditional business cards are just as important to your personal branding as social media pages. So, make sure that you always carry your business cards with you. Your personal brand should include all the places where your clients could interact with you, including the offline world. The trick is to see to it that your theme stays consistent. This means that you want to use a color scheme and fonts consistently.
What are some tips for creating a personal brand?
How To Develop A Unique Brand Personality Traits
Underlying consistency is the secret behind creating a successful personal brand. This means that you need to act in a way that fits in with your perceived image. You would like your personal brand to be authentic. In short, you want to ensure that your personal brand matches what people say about you in your absence. Another aspect to consider is that the whole aim of personal branding is not to focus on selling. Thus, you do not want to come across as another salesman.