You need to properly define three essential things to ensure that your personal brand has a good foundation. Focusing on these elements will give your brand the best starting point, and make the rest of the process easier.
Your message, audience, and connection points all need to be clearly defined and sorted out. If you are unclear on your brand, your audience will be as well.
1. First, you need to decide on your message
You need to decide on what you want your brand to convey and what you are trying to achieve through your brand. You need to fully understand your personal branding goal and how it will benefit your business or professional career.
2. Second, you need to decide on your audience
You should outline, and clearly define, exactly what type of people you are trying to target. This is referred to as creating your “audience persona” in the corporate world.
You need to understand for yourself, exactly who you want your audience to be.
You should try to define your audience in as much detail as possible, outlining things like:
- What do they want?
- What challenges do they face that you can help with?
- What age ranges are they in?
- What geographic areas are they in?
- Is it more beneficial to your brand to have an audience that is primarily female, male, or a combination of both?
- What income levels would you want your audience to be in? For instance, if you are selling a $50 course/training, anyone in the average income bracket would work … but if you’re selling a $1,500 course, or a $250 luxury face cream, you would want an audience that is in the higher income bracket.
- Most importantly, what can your brand do or solve for them?
You want to clearly understand all these little details of who you want your ideal audience to be, as your brand messaging needs to align with these overall traits. Otherwise, it will not resonate with them, and you’ll be left with a confused, and thus completely disengaged, audience.
3. Third, decide on how you will connect with your audience
Connecting with your audience is the best way to build trust, loyalty, and credibility. Your audience needs to feel a personal connection with you, and your brand.
This includes things such as which platforms you will use and what type of content you will create. For example, if your content is primarily photo-based, you would want to focus on Instagram and Pinterest. Whereas if your content is primarily video-based, you would want to focus on YouTube and TikTok.
However, you should try to create a well-rounded content creation strategy that uses a good mix of various types of content. That way you can leverage as many social media channels as possible, and in doing so, build a much larger audience.
It is also important to note that brand name consistency is very important as well. You should try to make sure your usernames on every platform you choose to be on, have the same username and visual branding elements (logo, brand colors, urls, etc).
Wrapping Up:
In the end, your primary focus should be to build a real relationship with your audience, and make them feel included in your content … this includes using appropriate language, replying to comments, and including calls to actions in your posts.
Of course, these three aspects are not the only things that need to be considered when building your personal brand, but they are three of the most important aspects that will provide you with a strong foundation.