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