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what creates a strong personal brand?
You already have a brand whether you realize it or not. So why not try to make a better one? Everybody these days speaks about building a brand, but I would say that it’s better to become your brand rather than build one. Do the hard work of becoming the person you’re trying to sell to people. Embrace your journey, accept all hard work and challenges with courage and integrity and stop searching for shortcuts and following somebody else’s step-by-step roadmaps. The credibility is found in the way you live, but not by teaching and providing endless tips that are just a theory.
Your personal branding it’s not just choosing 3 colours and 2 fonts, creating an avatar of your ideal client, and creating your offer. These are still valuable steps that are needed to be worked on and identified, but your personal brand is so much more than that. Your personal brand is YOU first of you, and the representation of your unique identity.
So what actually creates a strong personal brand?
Your values
In my previous blog posts, I touched slightly on the topic of values and I will be coming back to it in the future. As your values not only determine how you live your life, behave as a human being, and what you want to stand for in life, the principles you want to live by, the personal qualities and character
strengths you want to cultivate, but also how you show up, what your personal brand stands for and the way you run your business every single day.
It’s crucial for any human being, even if she is not a business owner, to clarify her values, and to come back to them regularly, to revise them. Values play a major role in developing your confidence. They provide you with inspiration, sustain you on your journey, and provide fulfilment in your everyday work. Sometimes achieving your goals might take a lot of time, by you can still choose to be courageous, curious, authentic, and persistent. In other words, you can choose to live in alignment with your values every single day of your journey.
The same goes for your business and personal brand. How do you want to show up? How do you want to serve your clients? How would you like people to feel when they interact with your brand? What would you like to stand for? It’s vital to clarify your own values so that you could do the same for your business. It will make you stand out (as your values are unique to you), be more fulfilled, and happier, serve better your clients and show up with amazing energy, as you are living your core values.
Here is a basic list of values to just give you an idea. You can find many more extended lists of interest if you’re really interested. Try to pick at least 10 values, think about why did you choose them, and put them in the order of priority.
- Loyalty
- Spirituality
- Humility
- Compassion
- Honesty
- Kindness
- Integrity
- Selflessness
- Determination
- Generosity
- Courage
- Tolerance
- Trustworthiness
- Equanimity
- Altruism
- Appreciation
- Empathy
- Toughness
- Self-Reliance
- Attentiveness
Your brand & business story
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.
– Seth Godin
Storytelling is more natural to us than we might think. We have been telling stories to each other for thousands of years before we even developed any means of writing communications. We use stories in our everyday communications. Storytelling can be a powerful tool in your business.
The reason why personal stories are very important is that they make you stand out from the crowd. Your stories are your unique selling point, and nobody can compete with that, as everybody’s stories are unique. A story is a great way to combat the noise, because it combines the information in a way that people will listen, and engage.
Another reason why stories are so effective is that they help our brain to understand and process information easier. Our brain is lazy, it doesn’t want to burn too many calories to understand something
Telling stories is vital in your business. And it doesn’t mean that you need to write 5 pages of your autobiography or bore your prospects with every single detail of your life on the about page of your website. What stories can you tell about your business?
- The business story, the story of why of your business. Why did you start your blog, your Youtube channel or a podcast? It should be something that is coming from your core.
- Founder story in other words it’s why you decided to do what you do, and what life event or realization lead you to where you’re now. Don’t overthink it. Be honest, share something that deeply triggered you, or pushed you to start your business.
- Your client’s story – simply testimonials of people you worked with.
Your brand statement
Your brand statement it’s a promise you give to your potential prospect in other words the problem that you solve with your products or services. You do need to spend some time thinking about your brand statement, crafting it, adjusting, and testing it.
Although, good brand statements cannot be created by only sitting, doing nothing and just inventing the words you think your potential clients want to hear. As I mentioned earlier you will need to do the hard of developing yourself, clarifying your values, and actually figuring out who you are, what values would you like to provide to people, and getting really good at your craft (which means starting taking action, developing new skills which can be hard and uncomfortable, putting yourself out there before you have everything figured out).
Through doing the actual work you will start to get more clarity of what you like, what you don’t, what differentiates you, and what lights you inside. From this place, you can start crafting your brand statement. The basic formula you can use is {What I am}. I {do what} {for whom} {with what benefit}. And I’m pretty sure the more work you do, the more experience you get, and the clear your brand statement will get.
I used to be jealous when I just started and saw the very clear and nice brand statements of some people, it was until I realized that it took them years to gain this clarity. So be patient, take action, and spend some time every week for example brainstorming your brand statement. And I’m pretty sure that you will start to gain clarity on it.
IDEAL CLIENT
Today selling everything to everybody doesn’t work anymore. So obviously everybody out there started to talk about defining your ideal client and creating its avatar. I did these exercises many times in the past, and to be honest I found them to be not very effective, especially when you just starting out. How are you supposed to know who your ideal client is when you don’t even know your own identity yet?
Most ideal client avatars are created based on their age, sex, the place they live in, income, education, family status and so on. But when you actually look in more depth at the people you chose to work with or who chose you, you realize that you were working with them based on their aspirations, and attitudes, in other words, based on the way people think.
Before start creating your ideal client’s avatar, I would recommend getting really clear on you’re. It will help you to narrow your focus and see what kind of people aren’t an ideal fit for you based on your values.
Name of you brand
If it’s your personal brand and you’re a solopreneur the best way to go it’s to name your website or business after you. I resisted this for such a long time and invented some weird names so that don’t have to use my real name. I chose to tell stories to myself that my surname is hard to pronounce and nobody will remember it. And to be honest, I wanted to hide my identity and origins, I didn’t want people to know that I’m Ukrainian. But with time I chose to change the story, I told myself and I started to feel proud of my surname. Remember that most of the world-famous brand names once were somebody’s last name!
Often your prospects won’t hire you because you have a fancy business name, but rather because of your personality, expertise, and skills. So stop overthinking it. If you feel a lot of resistance to using your name, you can name your brand with terminology that describes your business.
Strong point of view & Your personality
It was particularly hard for me to show my personality and express my point of view. As for the biggest part of my life, I was a people pleaser, I wanted to be liked by everybody. It was hard for me to express my point of view as somebody might disagree, oh my god! I acted like it was the end of the world.
But what I discovered with time and experience you cannot be liked by everybody, you cannot always say what people want you to say. It’s like betraying yourself in order to fit in. The worst feeling ever that is ruining your inside!
We follow and relate to people with strong points of view. People who are not afraid to express it, even if most people won’t agree. These people in any situation choose to be true to themselves and what they believe in. It can be uncomfortable as we all strive as human beings to belong, to be accepted, and to be loved. But believe me, the more you do it, the easier it will become. You will find your tribe of people who values what you have to say, who relate and who will listen to you. People who will be united around your brand.
Don’t be afraid to show your personality, share your experience, and struggles, and be real. People want to connect to real people. Many of your potential clients will choose to work with you because of your personality. Infuse your personality to become an aligned and authentic personal brand.
Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken.
– Oscar Wilde
Your platform, website, blog, landing page, email list
As a person who spent months building her first website without having any audience, hiding behind busy work I can say that you don’t need a perfect website when you start. You can start by having a simple blog page, landing page, or newsletter subscription form that takes several hours to set up.
When you build your brand it can be overwhelming to be everywhere. And if you are a solopreneur and don’t have a team behind you it’s not even possible physically. Social media can be a good tool, but it shouldn’t be your only tool. You don’t own these platforms. You need to think strategically, you need to have someplace that you actually OWN. Your prospects can find out about you from different sources, including social media, but all paths should lead to your ”home base” as Mike Kim refer to it in his book “You are the brand”.
With time any serious business owner should have a website. It’s the place where you can connect to your prospects as you want, and where you can store all your content. Your website is like your digital home and an online billboard of you and your brand, that will market your business 24/7 and connect to people even if you’re not there.
Visual, verbal, Value identities
You should create a consistent feeling with your personal brand among your prospects. Visual identity is the easiest to identify. Your colours, fonts, photos, and layouts will determine your visual identity.
Verbal identity it’s any type of written content: website copy, email, blog post, or social media post. It should be consistent in the same way as your visual style. Would you like to sound funny, friendly, empathetic, inspirational, professional and serious?
Value identity is how you position yourself in relation to your competitors, and how your prospects perceive you and your worth, how you make them feel.
positioning YOUR BRAND
When you just starting out your business and don’t know your worth yet it’s very easy to start comparing your brand to other businesses in your field who were there for years. That’s why you need to clarify who you’re, what values you offer to what group of people and why. It’s useless to compare yourself and you’re journey to somebody else’s, as everybody’s path is unique.
Your approach and perspective are unique. Your interests and passions are unique. Your services or products are unique. If you know your expertise, passions, values, and strengths you will find your place in the market even if there are many other people who do the same things you do.
Use your unique stories to differentiate yourself, your brand and your business from businesses out there.
Products & services
What problem do you solve with your products and services? Do you help people to survive and thrive? Do you constantly improve your skills and expertise so that you could serve your clients the best and create good products?
Your brand exists for a reason, not just to show a beautiful design. So you need to define your USP (unique selling proposition) and constantly improve it. Do you help your clients to make more money, gain skills, save time, build community, gain status, and find meaning in their lives with your products or services? If people didn’t have any problems most likely they won’t be searching for somebody like you who can provide a solution.
Spend some time to actually develop your products and services, name them, price them, test them and validate them.
Your communication with a client and her experience interacting with your brand
You can be good at your craft be it coaching, consulting, creating jewellery, or designing websites. But if you want your business and brand to be successful you need to be professional while communicating with your clients, properly manage all your projects and have systems in place that make the work easy, and efficient and create the best client experience.
Every part of your business is branding! The client experience of working with you, being on a call with you, and the material you send to your client, all this speaks about your professionalism as a business owner.
But don’t worry too much if you don’t have all these things up and running yet. It’s totally okay. You need some time, experience, and client work to be able to establish all the processes. In fact, every time you work with a new client, you can start adding on one by one the steps or working with you and creating a workflow for everything in your business. The aim here is to work smarter not harder and leave your clients satisfied.
Final thoughts
We are the sum of our experiences. Our personal brand is no different. Your personal brand is so much more than defining your ideal client, your offer and choosing 3 colours.
Your personal brand is an extension of your unique personality, your point of view, your values, and your unique stories. And of course, your USP (unique selling proposition), knowing your ideal client, your website, your visual identity, and the way you make people feel when they work with you or interact with your brand.
You’re the most valuable asset in your business. Work on yourself, explore your limits, face your fears and challenges with courage, take action, and become the person people would like to work with. Don’t just speak, do nothing and give tips, do the actual work, live your core values, solve your client’s problems, and provide them with the best client experience. All these factors will establish and create your strong personal brand.
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