HOW TO CREATE YOUR PERSONAL BRAND - PART 2
Step 5: Create your visual identity
Your personal brand’s visual identity will be the most powerful way to capture attention and build brand recognition. It should reflect the essence of your brand, its value proposition and how you differentiate yourself against the competition. If done correctly, your brand identity will encapsulate everything your brand stands for, and want to convey to your audience.
Designing your logo
When it comes to designing a logo, most people make the mistake of doing it too early on. In fact, your personal brand’s descriptive characteristics should always precede any form of visual identity, so don’t attempt to create your logo until the previous points are completed. When developing your logo design, your aim should be to make it simple, enabling it to be quickly decoded through the human eye. Typography, shapes, colours, and space must be combined to create a highly effective brand identity. Certain visual characteristics can be more prominent like its colour or boldness to reflect its attitude and personality.
Add a tagline
You should include a tagline, derived from your messaging that becomes an integral part of your logo, informing people of who you are and what you stand for.
Create your look and feel
In addition, a graphic style and colour palette should be developed to achieve the desired look and feel for your brand identity. This will include typography, photography, graphic images, icons and illustrations, which when combined, will visually represent your brand’s essence, values and personality.
Include some guidelines
Once completed, get at minimum some basic brand guidelines in place. These will form the standards and specifications of your brand’s visual and descriptive identity. Its purpose is to ensure consistency and brand integrity across all your communications.
Step 6: Develop your brand strategy
When developing your brand strategy, your primary focus should be to create visibility and awareness, therefore your focus should be based on the promotion of your brand. The key components of this will include a website and social networks.
A website is a must
Establishing your own website must be at the heart of your personal branding strategy. It will be something that you own and have full control over. Your website will become the central place where you showcase your brand identity, your story and your content. It must be well structured, have compelling messages and content and have a professional look and feel that creates impact and interest.
That first impression really counts, so your message must be clear, compelling and of value, so it grabs your audience’s attention. To achieve this, your home page must have a combination of content and graphics with a clear call to action. This will draw your audience in to find out more about you, and what you have to say or sell. Your call to action could be subscribing to your blog, registering for a free webinar, or a free consultation. Your content will include your value proposition and key messages. Graphics should include a combination of high-quality photos, images and icons.
Before starting on your website, document its structure, for example:
- Website structure
- About you or bio
- Services
- Testimonials
- Companies you have worked for and experience
- Case studies
- Speaking engagements
- Blog, video or podcasts
- Contact information
- Calls to action and subscriber forms
Use social media
Social media is a cost-effective way to draw your audience to your website. There are many other options available to promote your brand online. For example; search engine marketing techniques like Google Adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) which is a very good way of increasing your website traffic. If you are selling online, consider these within your strategy. If not, content-driven marketing will be the best approach, that will help to promote your brand organically.
Take a good look at all the social media platforms out there, and determine where you are most likely to find your audience. Is it on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube or so on? Pick the ones where you will find your customers and register your brand there. Whichever social media sites you choose, be consistent and use the same username across all of them. If your brand name is taken, come up with another way of including it so that the search engines will pick up on it.
All social media accounts work differently. For example, Facebook has both a profile and a fan page. They both represent you in different ways and offer different features. It’s important to get to know your social platforms well to effectively manage your networking presence.
Set yourself objectives
Your brand strategy should include your key objectives, which are measurable steps that you need to take to implement what you have set out to accomplish. It should include what you need to get done and by when.Step 7: Prepare your content plan
A well thought out content plan will help you to structure what you want to say and when you want to say it. When preparing a content plan you must place your audience at the centre of everything. The topics you want to cover, the problems you want to address, and the messages you want to convey. In doing this you will have the best chance of connecting with your audience in the best possible way.
Start by preparing the content for your website based on the structure you prepared in the preceding section. Remember to weave into your writing your value proposition and follow the brand identity you have created.
Next, start the planning for your blog and target how many posts you plan to send out over a twelve-month period. From this, you can work out how much time per month you need to spend writing content. Try to spread your posts evenly, but this may be driven by events or seasonal activities etc.The number of posts you write will probably be a balance between what your competitors are doing and how much time you have available. However, the most important thing is the originality and the quality of your content. Timing can play a very important role, and that is why you need to plan ahead. Look for key events, product launches and so on, as well as keeping an eye market trends and issues.Your content plan should start with your blog which becomes your primary source of information. Excerpts can be shared on social media sites, and always include a link back to your blog and website. Quotes can be taken and tweeted and photos can be posted on Instagram.
Step 8: Rollout your activities
After following these steps so far, you now have the building blocks in place to build your platforms and get yourself online:
Build your website
Your website should be your first priority. Make sure you do your research and choose the right website platform, and hosting service. Always use https protocol over http. This adds an additional layer of security ensuring all communications between your browser and website are encrypted.
Add the pages, content and graphics to your website. If you have some experience and are doing this yourself, choose a themed package to help you with the layout. Don’t purchase an off-the-shelf theme without some advice. It could be full of plug-ins and features that you won’t use and that slow your website down.
Preparing your website at the front end with high-quality content and imagery is one thing, the other is how it will operate at the back end. This means your website must contain a good level of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This will improve web crawling and website content indexing. Understanding how you can optimise this is key as it will enable your website to rank well over time in search engine results pages.
Write your posts
When your website is launched, start writing your first posts. By getting them out on social media, you will begin to build a following. This can take time, and the more effort you put into this, the quicker you will see your results. As soon as you start to post, you need to gauge its effectiveness. As well as the feedback generated from the sites, send links out to your colleagues and industry contacts and ask for their feedback. This will help you to fine-tune your future posts. As you become more well known, your audience start to ask you to cover specific topics which all goes towards a deeper understanding of your customers.
Step 9: Maintaining your brand
By following a structured plan, you have the best possible chance of meeting and exceeding your goals. Over time, your goals will change; either they will become more ambitious, or change as you diversify or move onto other things. Whatever the future holds for you, maintaining your brand will ensure it always is a true reflection of you. With some careful attention, your brand will always remain true to you and your audience. And while jobs, companies and careers come and go, your brand will be there withstanding the test of time.
Keep things up to date
It’s important to always keep your content up to date. That includes all the pages to keep your website looking fresh and current, particularly as your popularity grows and people return again over time. Develop your website to include new pages, free information downloads and so on, to make it as interactive as possible, enhancing the user experience. Ensure that the SEO and all back end software, licenses, plugins are kept up to date.
If you’re doing this work yourself, spend some time keeping up to date with changes in search engines and social media platforms, as these things move at a rapid pace. Above all, keep up to date and in touch with your market, your competition and your audience.Summary
Developing your personal brand takes time and commitment, but once up and running, it can be relatively easy to maintain. The hard work you put in will be highly beneficial in giving you that competitive edge in our fast-moving digital world. Whether that’s over your peers, your career, job opportunities or as an entrepreneur.
Once your personal brand becomes established, it will bring many benefits. This starts with the shaping of your own story and goes on to the development of your sense of self, building your self-confidence along the way. By taking control of your narrative, you take control of yourself, your direction and your identity. Your online relationships will flourish, and opportunities will open up to you that would have never been possible before.
Source: BRANDALLAGENCY
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