How to build your personal brand as an entrepreneur

Building your personal brand helps you nurture trust in your target audience, showcase yourself as an authority in your field, get featured in online and print media, and build a community.

However, personal branding and business branding aren’t the same things.

A business brand is built around how you want your business to be identified and differentiated from other businesses. A personal brand, on the other hand, is built around how you want others to identify you — your lifestyle, values, personality, and interests.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can build your personal brand and grow your customer base.

Build your foundation

Building a strong and authentic personal brand requires you to take inventory of what you stand for. The first step in building your personal brand is to lay a foundation that gives you the confidence and authenticity to build upon.

Branding doesn’t mean showcasing yourself as something you’re not. Instead, it’s used to sincerely (and strategically) project your authentic self to clients and customers. In the same way, your personal brand should tell your audience about your skills, achievements, beliefs, and values.

When building a strong foundation for your personal brand, start by taking your existing brand assets into account:

• The skills you possess as well as the training, certifications, achievements, and awards you’ve received.
• The various industries, fields, or topics you’re interested in or passionate about.
• The core values you hold dear and the things you stand for.

After you’ve figured out your existing brand assets, you can start bringing together the key elements of your personal brand.

Ask yourself:

• What’s your brand vision? What do you want to be recognized for?
• Why is building a personal brand important to you?
• What message do you want to get across to your target audience?

These questions will help you formulate your brand vision and message.

Connect with your target audience

Collaborating with other leaders in your industry and mentioning each other in social media posts can help you increase your outreach.

You also need to make sure that you share your content on the right social media platforms. For example, if you create visual graphics or infographic-based content, Twitter and Instagram are great platforms for sharing it with your followers.

Another way to connect with your target audience is by giving your posts a personal touch. Consider providing unique insight through tweets, videos, and captions. This way, people will know your stance and it will help establish you as an authority in your industry.

Creating and sharing free content on your personal social media page can also help you earn the trust of your followers and build your personal brand. Once you’ve jotted down some topics, choose the type of content you want to create and decide which platforms you’ll share it on. Some of the common content types include articles, online courses, podcasts, infographics, and PDF guides.

Keep in mind that creating and sharing content can be time-intensive. Start with one or two main content types (like articles or videos) and promote your content through a few different marketing channels (such as Twitter and YouTube).

Instead of targeting a wide audience right off the bat, focus on becoming a leader in your community. Start by defining your target audience and building a community for them to communicate with each other, have discussions about a topic, help each other, and get in touch with you directly. Consider creating a Facebook Group or a private forum to connect with your target audience.

Increase your visibility and online presence

Sharing content on your own platform (such as your website or social media profiles) enables you to attract new customers, but it requires a lot of time and effort. Getting featured on other platforms gives you exposure to other people’s audiences.

People want to know about other people in their industry and learn from their experiences.

Managing your own outreach by personally reaching out to media outlets is a great way to build your personal brand. These may include online magazines, high-authority websites, and podcasts.

Here are some actionable tips you can use to increase your visibility and online presence:

• Get interviewed on webinars and podcasts that are popular in your industry.
• Create written content for online magazines and blogs that are read by your target audience. These are typically sent out in email newsletters.
• Speak at live conferences, casual meetups, and summits that your peers and target audience attends.

Conclusion

Building your personal brand as an entrepreneur can help you differentiate yourself from your competition. Start by building a solid foundation and connecting with your target audience. After that, focus on increasing your visibility and online presence.

What platforms do you use to communicate with your target audience? Let us know by commenting below.