Personal Branding: Building a Personal Brand

Personal branding has become essential for anyone looking to carve a professional reputation in society. In fact, personal branding is a refined display of your professional expertise and professionalism.

Personal branding has gained momentum in the past few years. The job market has become more competitive and hence, it is up to you to create a niche for yourself. People with strong branding are seen as authentic, credible, and reliable by clients, customers and the general public.

Before we get into personal branding, let’s take a quick look at the basics – branding.

What is Branding?

In the world of commerce, every company wishes to build a brand reputation that is admired by all stakeholders. The same rule also applies to individual professionals. The marketplace era has necessitated that whether you are an organization or a single-person brand, you need to be reliable and appealing.

Learning brand marketing can give you an even more in-depth understanding of the concept, preparing you for success.

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding or self-branding is the application of proven marketing principles and practices to promote an individual instead of a corporate entity or an organization. Building a personal brand can be quite a challenge if you don’t have a good grasp of marketing concepts, technologies, and channels. However, there are some excellent marketing courses available online that one can join to understand the nuances of marketing and apply the same to build a strong personal brand as well.

By undertaking a well-planned personal branding strategy, you can remain on track to achieve professional growth and your goals related to job security, financial security and social reputation etc.

Why Build a Self-Brand?

Building a personal brand is essential for growth nowadays. Businesses achieve success when they are able to maintain market differentiation through branding. Similarly, a professional would need to highlight the individual skills and abilities that will make the person rise above their peers.

Once you identify your goals and evaluate your skills and abilities in the competitive market, personal branding helps you move forward toward those goals. You can be a self-employed professional or a senior executive in a company or even a social celebrity, and personal branding would help you grow in every scenario.

One needs to carefully cultivate an image that is catchy and magnetic enough to attract the audience. The rise of digital marketing, especially social media marketing, has created exceptional opportunities to build individual brands. The influencers you see on YouTube or Instagram are also personal brands renowned for their unique content and audience engagement.

How to Build a Personal Brand?

Building a personal brand requires one to enhance the professional reputation and the image that serves as the calling card. There has to be a powerful, impressive and amiable personal brand identity that makes the person noted for behavioural qualities and professional acumen.
For instance, Bill Gates name is synonymous with the millions of computers all over the world, and when you hear Steve Jobs, you can’t stop imagining an iPhone. These people have built their names synonymous with their companies. There are also brands like Robin Sharma, who is a standalone champion life coach, best-selling author and motivator.

There are many things that need to be focused upon for self-branding.

Here are some impactful self-branding tips that would help you grow your personal brand:

• Leveraging digital channels efficiently to highlight yourself
• Showcasing your achievements and professional performances such as completing projects, signing deals or acquiring certifications, etc.
• Maintaining a positive social media presence
• Continuous learning through online courses and accreditations/badges for digital display
• Building a personal website with the aim to create a thought leadership image
• Professional networking among industry bodies
• Participation in offline events, conferences, seminars and contributions to social causes

The most important thing is to enhance as well as display your personal qualities. People love to meet and connect with reliable and knowledgeable people online. They wish to find people who are credible, trustworthy, comfortable and willing. Testimonials from clients, peer reviews, comments from social media followers, etc. are all crucial components of the image-building strategy.

Enhancing knowledge for personal branding is now easier than ever, courtesy of online courses. You can find in-depth and updated marketing courses on prominent e-learning platforms to enhance your personal brand value in any field. You can get the highest-paid jobs in India in your vertical of choice or earn handsomely as an individual brand. There are streams like arts, business, science, technology, education, healthcare and even life coaching wherein one can become a credible market force.

The only thing to be mindful of is to identify the opportunity and make a move. Now is probably the best time to do it!