Personal branding goes beyond vanity and self-promotion. It’s about changing yourself for the better and encouraging others to do the same.
By building trust, delivering reliable information, and staying true to yourself, you can quickly establish a solid personal brand for yourself. Today, we’re going to look at what you can do to start properly with personal branding and learn from 5 personal branding success stories as examples.
What is personal branding?
The crux of personal branding is using a person and their career as a brand as opposed to a product. Here, the person in question is always developing, progressing, and maintaining a reputation to uphold their impression on individuals, groups, and other organizations. Personal branding goes beyond self-help practices and self-improvement and instead focuses on the person as a whole package and the best way to present that package to the world.
Personal branding is how you want to promote yourself. That is, it combines your skills, career, stories, experience, and personality as a neatly bundled package to present to the world to establish an online presence and leave an impression on the people of the world.
Why is personal branding important?
When asked, few people will be able to answer straight away what the main objective of their business is. For most, it’ll take a lifetime of managing and running a business before they realize what they want to be known for as a person, and as a brand.
Deciding on what you want to be known as, and working towards establishing that reputation is what you want to aim for when building your brand. Therefore, aim high, and try to hit your goals and you’ll have started on the right foot. There isn’t a specific way to start developing your personal brand. It comes from deciding whether you want to be known as a motivational speaker, leading entrepreneur, or an active volunteer with loads of achievements. However, the key starting point is a good understanding of yourself and the motivation required to bring your brand into existence. In other words, if you don’t believe in yourself, you can’t expect others to give you a second thought.
It’s important to remember that you don’t have to own a well-established business to start building your brand. The need stems from the acknowledgment that, if you have a story to share with the rest of the world, you should actively work towards building a personal brand and make examples for others in personal branding, so people will listen to you with intent. Therefore, establishing a good personal brand is vital for any influencer or leader.
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How do you get a good start with personal branding?
If you’ve set yourself up with the motivation of creating a successful brand but don’t have the know-how, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’re going to take a good look at what it takes to establish your personal brand along with some concrete examples from the world’s leading influencers and personal branding success stories.
1. Creating Purposeful Content and Promoting It to the Right People
If your content serves no purpose other than self-promotion, your audience will not receive it well and you might even end up getting some negative PR for it. Therefore, aim for quality over quantity. While it’s important to keep videos, posts, and blogs coming out regularly, if you’re forcing yourself to pump out content that serves no real purpose or is of no use to your audience, you will end up poisoning your reputation.
2. Purposeful Content
Creating huge amounts of content without a purpose is a common pitfall when it comes to building your personal brand. If you’re creating content in large amounts with little to no traction, you won’t be making any progress. Therefore, the best advice you can follow here is to create engaging and purposeful content. Don’t just try to check another item off your list but rather focus on creating something which will engage the audience, benefit them, and draw more attention to yourself.
3. Setting Aside the Promotion Budget
Another key thing to remember here is that you need to set aside a budget for content promotion. This is very important because, even if you were to create engaging content, unless you promote it, it’s very unlikely to reach the masses. Therefore, always set aside a budget and time for both creating the content and promoting it. To take it to somewhat of an extreme, when it comes to content creation is, spending money to promote your content is vital. Without this resolve, creating content is not for you.
To sum it up, every bit of content you create should come with pre-planned promotion budgets, in addition to the goal or purpose you want to achieve with the content. Delivering your content to the target audience is the best way forward when trying to establish your personal brand and getting recognition.
4. Consistency Is Key – Trust through quality repetition
When you’re building a personal brand across different social media platforms, you need to be consistent. Don’t let your audience on one platform feel left out on another platform. Therefore, your engagement with your audience, the content you share with them, and the effort you put into bringing up those accounts, need to be very consistent.
Leading influencers across the spectrum maintain their content, aesthetics, and engagement consistent across all their social media platforms. This trait is something you want to learn quickly and adopt into your personal skills if you want to grow your personal brand. Get Inspiration from the examples and success stories in personal branding.
5. Strive to Serve Your Audience
Put the interests of your audience before yourself, and you’ll find that you’re serving them and growing along with them as well. Taking leading influencers as an example, they offer heaps of content for free without expecting anything in return. This helps in creating trust with your audience and allows you to share content with a larger audience.
6. Finding the right USP – Unique Selling Proposition
Standing out from your competition is what will let you stay on top of your game and grow fast. Therefore, find what makes you unique and earnestly try to nurture and bring out on all your content and promotional media. To achieve success in personal branding, you need to be able to sell your best points to the major audience. Without a good grip on what makes you the best at what you do, you’ll quickly lose base and stop growing. Therefore, ensure you know what makes you unique and do your best to nurture it along with your brand and use it to the best of your ability. Following examples from established brands, if you have something unique about yourself, make it your number one trait and market it positively.
Some Questions You Should Be Asking Yourself When Building a Personal Brand
Here’s a shortlist of questions you should be asking yourself before you start building your personal brand:
- How will your brand make people feel about themselves?
- What makes you unique?
- What are your core values and beliefs?
- What skillsets are you bringing to the table?
- What makes you an influential person?
- What problems are you planning to solve?
- How do you determine success and failure?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you should have a clear path towards your goal of promoting and establishing a strong personal brand. These questions drive motivation, keep you on track, and help achieve goals in the long run, and help you create personal branding success examples.
Why Is It Important to Build and Establish Your Personal Brand?
As you continue to share your story and people start engaging with it, you will notice that like-minded people are starting to follow you across your social media. Moreover, they’ll engage more with your content and share among their peers as well. This is how you grow your brand and your business, by eventually reaching the right people for your kind of consumption.
It won’t be rosy all the way. And so, you will meet a lot of people along the way who will disagree with you. In these cases, just deal with disagreements gracefully. If you can show maturity and control with people who are not your fans, you will come out on top as a reliable brand.
With enough people following you, events you schedule for your brand and company will sell out quickly. This is the power of building a strong personal brand and is the primary reason you should strive towards establishing it.
Build Trust with People Who Matter
If you manage to establish your personal brand, you create a platform through which people can research and understand you before conducting business. Once they get a hold of how you work and your principles, they’ll be more likely to work with you and build lasting relationships. As an influencer, your personal brand dictates how and where you find the right connections. Through a personal brand, build trusting connections before conducting business. With more connections and consistency across your dealings, you’ll be a trusted brand in no time.
Personal Branding Case Study – 5 Notable Examples of Personal Branding Success
Now, let’s look at some of the biggest names in personal branding success history. You should have heard about most of these people, and so, let’s take a good look at what made these people the best of the best and how they paved their own success stories.
1. Simon Sinek – A lesson in clarity
Simon Sinek is brilliant at one thing – and that is explaining to the masses who he is and what he does. Before establishing yourself as a reliable brand, you need to be able to tell people what you can offer them. And this is where Simon excels.
Simon is informative across all his media – website, social platforms, and his books. He shares his knowledge clearly and ensures that everything you read is relatable, and easily digestible. This is one of the main reasons he has a massive following and great support from his audience. Therefore, if you strive to bring clarity to your business goals, communication, and message, you should be on par with what Simon does best and quickly establish your brand as a reliable source of information.
2. Oprah Winfrey – The power of inspiration and influence
Oprah Winfrey – One of the biggest household names and one of the amazing examples of personal branding success. And so, you won’t find a lot of people who aren’t familiar with Oprah Winfrey’s work. Therefore, it goes without saying, there’s a lot to learn from her as she has managed to leverage her personal brand to make her way up to the billionaire ladder.
Living the dream
From the very beginning Oprah has had clear sights on her personal branding, and over the years, has adapted it, managed it, and capitalized on it in a way very few other people have managed to do so. And now, she’s living the dream life and is making money doing what she enjoys the most.
Oprah has strived to successfully guide people to push them and reach their full potentials. In addition to monetary help, she has enabled people to work towards their life’s dreams.
Ushering in Change
Oprah goes beyond personal branding though. She has managed to turn her brand into something synonymous with helping, changing people, and improving the lives of people. Her words influence people and change them positively. This is what you should strive for if you want to join the ranks of personal branding success stories.
Consistency and intent
According to Oprah, there are two keys to personal branding success, consistency, and intention. We’ve already talked about how important consistency is in establishing trust with your brand. Oprah has earned the trust of millions across America and the world with clear goals, virtues, and most importantly, consistency in her actions. In addition to this, she has kept her intentions firm and steadfast. Therefore, adopting her clear and honest intentions is what will allow you to build trust and grow your personal brand.
3. Neil Patel – Knowing how to sell yourself
Neil is a marketing guru through-and-through. He has co-founded multiple multi-million-dollar companies while retaining the reputation and traction of his own personal brand. If you’ve dabbled with online marketing before, there’s a chance you’ve come across his blogs and articles while doing your research. He’s well-known for writing interesting and incredibly helpful online marketing articles that provide top-notch advice for those starting out. This is what makes him one of the best examples of a personal branding success story.
If any influencer knows how to sell themselves, it’s Neil. His mantra allows you to think beyond your limitations and use what you can to succeed. More important, Neil strives on writing well-researched and thorough articles on online marketing. In addition to research, he backs it up and provides illustrative examples from his own experience as an online marketing superstar and influencer. Therefore, selling yourself as a trusted hub of useful information is one of the pillars of setting up your personal brand.
4. Michelle Obama – The importance of communication and genuineness
One of the great personal branding examples. Using her influence and resources as the First Lady, Michelle Obama has spared no expense in building her own personal brand and giving back to the world. Michelle is an intelligent woman with concrete thought and decision-making skills. Using these abilities, she has established herself as a reliable leader in her own right.
Clear Communication
She’s a prime example of using resources and a position of power properly. She has championed several initiatives to improve human life around the globe. With frequent visits to impoverished communities, networking with major leaders, and participating in events globally, she has become a notable public figure and has developed a reputable personal brand. The key takeaways from Michelle’s success story are her articulation skills. Being able to talk to people from different walks of life empathically is a difficult but important skill to master as an influencer. Therefore, if you work on good communication with your followers, you’ll be able to develop yourself as a dependable brand.
Being Genuine and Staying True to Yourself
In addition to communication, Michell has one additional superpower – being herself. As a result, she has managed to grow beyond the identity of being the First Lady and has established herself as Michelle Obama, the dependable public image who stands for health, education, feminist causes and actively fights against racial discrimination. Therefore, a key lesson here is to be natural and yourself in your actions and speech. It’s hard to keep up an image of something you are not, therefore, your best bet when it comes to personal branding success is being legitimate with your audience and just being yourself. In addition to being more relatable, you will also earn trust from your followers.
5. Casey Neistat – Doing what you believe in
Casey Neistat is a lesson in rebellion. With over 12 million subscribers on YouTube and a massive following on Instagram, he’s a force to be reckoned with. He’s one of the perfect examples of personal branding and someone willing to go against the norms and do things his way. More importantly, he motivates people to do the things they can’t do and that’s a very powerful skill.
With extravagant film-making skills, he’s been recognized globally as a top influencer. His content is honest, to-the-point, and in-your-face. He doesn’t sugar-coat things and manages to handle all negativity effectively. Therefore, if you’re planning on establishing a personal brand and you’re unsure about all the negativity that comes from people because of it, take a page out of Casey’s book and strive to prove people wrong, do your own thing and live for yourself. He encourages people to go for what they believe in, and that’s what you should do with your own personal brand.
Key Takeaways on Personal Branding
Now that we’ve established how you can start creating your personal brand, and walked through a few examples of personal branding success, it’s important to list out some key takeaways to drill the point home and get you started on the right foot.
1. Research
Before you leap personal branding and marketing, you need to be thorough with your research. The most important thing here is to find yourself, determine your goals and what you want to do. Therefore, if you put in the time and effort to find what works for you, you will have a good time developing it into your personal brand.
2. Be Interactive, Accessible, and Visible
You can’t expect to build lasting relationships and a reliable personal brand if you keep yourself holed up in your personal office all the time. One of the key aspects of personal branding success is being able to reach out, network, and interact with people. Work your way through events, both for business and fun, and try to enjoy the activities. The effort you put into interacting with people, be it your audience or business partners, goes a long way in building trust and reliability.
3. Be Genuine and Consistent
Always be honest with yourself and your audience throughout all your interactions, live or online. Everything you plan and do should be an accurate representation of who you are, the values you stand for, and the choices you’re willing to make. Therefore, strive to become a person of authority within your niche, a person you would trust, and actively engage with.
Conclusion
With all that said and done, one key thing to remember is that personal branding is more than just selling and marketing yourself. Your goal should always be to make sure that the people around you and your audience perceive you as the person you strive to become every day. While many people misunderstand personal branding as self-promotion, don’t let that distract you from the fact that it’s about self-growth and inspiring others. Therefore, it’s about taking control of your reputation and growing with it.
Establishing your personal brand with a good reputation will come as a result of constant struggle, good decisions, and dealing effectively with people. Everyone will start forming their own opinions about you and if you don’t actively participate in evolving your personal brand and maintaining your image, you will let those opinions thrive and take over. Therefore, take control of your personal brand and ensure that people see the best of what you are and can be.