How To Build Personal Branding To Increase Your Entrepreneurial Value

If you think that personal branding is only for the freelancers, you are wrong! Even as an entrepreneur, you must equally focus on building personal branding to get more value and achieve your target.

Just like company branding, entrepreneurs should invest in personal branding. Besides shaping your reputation, it increases your visibility in the industry, makes you available to customers, and leaves a lasting impression on others.

Read this article till the end to know how you can work on building personal branding as an entrepreneur. Also, you will learn how personal branding works for some renowned entrepreneurs.

What is a Personal Brand?

A personal brand means the image or reputation others have of an individual. It includes the qualities, personality traits, and values others attach to you when they consider you as a professional or public figure. It projects a holistic view of your online and offline personality and sets you apart from the rest.

What is Personal Branding?

Speaking of personal branding, it is your strategy for shaping and managing your personal brand. All the efforts you make intentionally to influence how others perceive you are involved in personal branding. 

This is an ongoing process to align your actions and behaviors with your personal brand, creating brand awareness that aims at building a positive reputation so that you can reach your professional or personal goals.

Top Examples

Here are some examples of entrepreneurs who developed their own personal brand:

Aaron Ward

Aaron Ward is an entrepreneur who works as a digital performance marketing specialist.

He even worked for big names like Medium, Red Bull, and Spotify. You can also catch him on his blog and YouTube channel teaching about personal branding on social media. He has successfully established himself as a brand using a blend of his content and personality.

Darius Foroux

Darius Foroux is one of the most popular writers on Medium who shares tips on self-improvement, productivity, and psychology. At the same time, he is also a successful blogger, entrepreneur, and podcaster.

Besides the regular articles, he offers exclusive content for his email newsletter subscribers. Also, on all his website posts, he shares his own hard-drawing as the main attraction.

Carol Tice 

As an entrepreneur, Carol Tice helps struggling and new writers through the website named Make a Living Writing. She even owns a self-titled website that functions as a portfolio for those who want to hire her for writing.

She has not stopped after becoming a successful writer; she continued to teach others the formula of success. She has been quite consistent with personal branding, using the same headshot across her websites and social platforms. 

Noah Kagan 

You may know Noah Kagan as the CEO of AppSumo, but he is also a successful entrepreneur and content creator. He is often regarded as an example of strong personal branding. 

You can see the same branding elements (color, tone, etc.) across his website, newsletter, and YouTube channel. Though his branding is simple, it highlights his skills, expertise, and high-value content.

Dulma 

Dulma is a content creator and entrepreneur who helps other creators to grow their brands. She used TikTok to build her personal brand. Through her consistent creation of quality content, she could easily resonate with her target audience. 

Dulma often performs 100-day challenges that get her net followers and encourage her to create content continuously.

Reasons to Build a Personal Brand

If you are an entrepreneur who is working on setting up a business, the idea of developing personal branding should come naturally to you. As the owner, you are the face of your business. Hence, having your personal brand makes perfect sense.

When you have a personal brand, it will distinguish you from your competitors. Also, it helps you form a lasting impression on your customers, clients, and audience. A more important point is without compelling personal branding, an entrepreneur might end up struggling to build a sustainable and profitable business.

You might have seen that people are more interested in following the business owners instead of the companies. It can be said that through the personal branding of the entrepreneur, companies can get better exposure. For this reason, business owners should focus on developing their personal branding to offer leverage to their business endeavors.

The Essential Elements

#1. Brand Values

On the basis of your industry and audience, one must select the traits that they want to amplify or project to the audience. 

#2. Reliability and Integrity

You also need to be consistent with your values and principles so that others find you to be trustworthy. This will also showcase your integrity toward your values.

#3. Charming Personality 

To build a personal brand, you need to have a charming personality. Thus, you can make yourself appealing to others.

Learn more about marketing strategies by listening to these top marketing podcasts that will transform your strategy.

#4. Social Media Profiles

These days, social media plays a significant role in personal branding. Hence, entrepreneurs should have profiles on all relevant social platforms and be active there.

#5. Unique Viewpoint

What sets you apart from the others is a unique point of view. Hence, it is imperative that you broadcast your point of view to your audience so that they can know about your personal branding.

#6. Consistent Social Media Posting

Having profiles on social platforms is not enough. You must regularly post on those sharing your views of business or any other trending topics. And if staying consistent seems overwhelming, you can always use marketing automation tools to make your work easier!

How to Build a Personal Brand

#1. Find the Purpose for Your Personal Brand

Before starting to work on personal branding, entrepreneurs should have a clear idea about the objectives of their personal branding. Ask yourself why you want to have personal branding and how you are going to get to your target.

Write down the things you want to achieve through personal branding. This will help you create an accurate strategy for branding and work on it with the necessary attention.

#2. Create Brand Vision and Values Statements

The foundation of personal branding consists of key elements such as vision and brand statement. These will help you make crucial decisions about personal brand development. For example, the brand vision will clarify what you want to be known for. 

On the other hand, brand statements are the messages you want to communicate with your audience through your content. Both play a key role in developing personal branding strategies for entrepreneurs.

#3. Identify Your Target Audience

As an entrepreneur, you must be aware of the fact that it is not possible to appeal to everyone with your branding. So, trying to be liked by everyone may result in not being liked by anyone. 

Hence, you need to find out who your target audience is and build a brand that attracts them. To find the audience, you can categorize using demographic traits, goals and aspirants, and their pain points.

#4. Think Up a Unique Brand Identity

While creating a personal brand, entrepreneurs should also come up with a unique identity for their brand. Thus, they could become instantly recognizable by their followers. For instance, you can use the brand color and theme of your product while presenting your personal brand to the audience or use a storytelling sales strategy. 

If you want to have a separate identity for your personal brand, that is also fine. Just make sure to be consistent with the themes you use.

#5. Craft a Framework for the Personal Brand

After these points have been sorted, the entrepreneurs have to start working on brand strategy or personal branding framework. To find the right brand framework for yourself, you must understand your personality and invest a good amount of time and effort.

Choose the best qualities that will add value to the business and brand. Showcase that to the audience so that they understand how you can add value to their lives. Also, consider your target audience and expertise while selecting the branding story. 

Also read: How to use ChatGPT code interpreter to create branded QR codes.

#6. Make Your Brand Visible Online

In this era of technology, you must be visible online to promote personal branding. Without it, it is impossible to grab the attention of the audience. While social media can help you reach a large audience, you must not depend on that only. 

There are other ways to promote your personal brand, such as your own website or blog. Moreover, you can arrange for different webinars to get in touch with your audience.

#7. Follow Personal Branding Leaders

Before getting involved in personal branding, you should remember that different people become successful through different methods. So, no one can share a foolproof method with you for the success of personal branding. For this reason, you need to follow the leaders of personal branding in your niche and see the approaches they follow to achieve their targets.

While following, entrepreneurs must also analyze the strategies they use. Also, do not forget to make the necessary changes before implementing those on your own branding. You can also collaborate with influencers through various influencer marketing platforms to add a further edge to your marketing campaign.

#8. Network With Like-Minded Personal Brands

Through networking, you can make yourself known to the community belonging to your niche. You can also leverage networking to become familiar to the audience that follows your business industry. 

Find like-minded entrepreneurs in your industry or people who are also looking to develop their personal branding. Thus, you can both help each other establish the brand. The audience will also be happy to know about industry leaders they can follow.

#9. Get Endorsed by Top Professionals

When the top professionals in the industry endorse you on an open platform or social media, it becomes easier to prove yourself as a knowledgeable, visionary, and hard-working entrepreneur. 

Ask your professors, colleagues, managers, or other big names in your network to endorse your talent and skills. This can improve your credibility among the audience. Include these testimonials on your website and social media like LinkedIn so that others can see them easily. 

#10. Create an Engaging Online Presence

Once you are resolute to establish your personal brand, you need to have a strong online presence. As mentioned before, you should be present in all relevant social media. At the same time, you must be active there so that if someone tries to get in touch with you, they can do so easily.

Also read: How LinkedIn creator mode can elevate your brand presence.

Enlisting yourself in different online directories with your contact details is another useful way to be available to the audience. 

#11. Create Web Content and Copy for Your Brand

For many entrepreneurs, creating informative and creative web content and copies are effective ways to build personal branding. In this way, they can easily earn the trust of the target audience. 

Instead of convincing others that you will be able to help them, you can directly create helpful content using content creation tools. As an example, you will notice that popular entrepreneurs regularly publish online content (articles, videos, podcasts, online courses, webinars, eBooks, case studies) to build and nurture their audience base.

#12. Focus on Developing a Brand Community

If you want to become a known face through personal branding, you must have an engaged community following you. It could be the social platforms or your personal blog where you can stay in touch with your audience. 

Using those platforms, you can either resolve the issues of your niche or share your valuable opinion on related topics. If you are at a loss for interactive and engaging content ideas, you’ll find plenty online. But the rule of thumb is that whatever you create should resonate with your brand voice.

As your audience can learn from you, they will start actively following you. This is how you can develop a brand community of your own.

#13. SEO and Online Advertising

One successful approach to reaching a large audience with personal branding is to focus on SEO and online ads. With the help of SEO, you can make your social profiles more visible to the audience of your target demographics.

You can also run ads as a new entrepreneur to increase your online visibility. If there are other entrepreneurs with similar names, putting online ads for your social profiles will help your audience find you easily.

Conclusion

Now that you know having personal branding is no less important for entrepreneurs, they must start leveraging this for their professional success. Following this comprehensive guide, entrepreneurs should be able to build personal branding effortlessly. 

In this era of social networks, they must emphasize having an active and consistent presence on social media. For that, you can utilize these content creation tools that will make posting on social media easier.