Personal Branding for Entrepreneurs: The Essential Beginners’ Guide
Introduction
With start-ups, bloggers, and influencers receiving tremendous applause, this is a golden age for entrepreneurship. While you are already excelling in your industry as an entrepreneur, take a step further and be well-known for it. Yes, we’re asking you to make use of personal branding strategies to boost your business.
Don’t get us wrong, this is not just for the showbiz. Being a popular face in your industry can fetch you more business, help you make an impact, and take you closer to your vision.
As you already know, entrepreneurship is very different from the corporate culture. Here, you are the founding pillar of your business. Thus, everything you do will have a striking impact on your business.
So, why not use this fact to your advantage? By putting your thoughts, life-snippets, and ideologies out there, you are letting others peek inside your life. And by doing so, you are opening the gates of communication, friendliness, and reachability: traits everyone likes in a leader.
To check how can you come around doing it, first understand what personal branding is all about.
What is Personal Branding?
The practice of marketing one’s skill, career, and brand is called personal branding. It aims at establishing a customised image of an individual and their brand.
In his book, Erving Goffman, an influential sociologist termed Self Presentation as the way people want to be seen by others around them. It refers to looking at yourself from an outsider’s point of view.
This theory of self-presentation can be defined in modern terms as personal branding. Both have to do with how the public sees an individual. So, personal branding is more like a constant documentation of one’s life and their thoughts.
Now that you’ve got the list of personal branding, let’s dive deep in it.
Why is personal branding important?
Here are different ways in which personal branding can prove as a blessing for an entrepreneur.
Helps you make an image for yourself
First impressions have now become the make-or-break point in marketing. People judge a website within 3 seconds of viewing it. They scroll through a social media profile half-attentively and decide within a matter of seconds if they find the person worth following or not.
During such times, it is important to have a brand image that appeals to the public. If they like your persona and what you have to share, they are also going to like your work/brand. Hence, by branding yourself, you invite others to know your brand through you.
As evident, this is one of the main reasons why entrepreneurs should invest in personal branding.
Helps you connect to an audience
People love interacting with personalities they admire or idolize. By being present on social media, you can communicate with people who are seeking help, praising your work, or reaching out for business.
Moreover, connecting with the audience is always a fulfilling thing. It keeps you motivated and encourages you to keep moving forward. What’s better than accepting a word of kindness and returning it with better services?
Keeps you in the market
If you haven’t realised yet, we’ll break it to you. All your competitors are already profiting from personal branding. And to be in the business, you have to keep up-to-date with what others are doing.
Personal branding in marketing gets you money and fame equally. By promoting yourself through a blog or social media posts, you stay in the talks. Your audience gets reminded of your work every time they see a post from you, thus keeping your business alive.
Additionally, you can also share-worthy information, tips and tricks, or details of your journey while branding yourself. If the audience finds the information useful, they’ll reward you by sharing it forward. This way, you can gain even more popularity, which will always prove beneficial for your brand.
Where to start
The easiest way to find an audience is on the internet. People are curious. They appreciate entertainment and show interest in following people they admire. And you can use this knowledge to your benefit and build up an online presence.
Before you dive into personal branding tips, make sure you are up to date with the basics. Personal branding can be put into effect by taking the following steps.
Make a personal website
A website is like a detailed glimpse into your work, life, and thoughts. It gives you the freedom to play around with space. And more importantly, there are no set rules to it. You can represent yourself the way that appeals you the most.
Thus, in a way, your website reflects who you are and what you do. Branding your skills, experience, and vision on the website can create a suitable information about your brand and yourself.
Create social media profiles
Social media is the easiest and the most crucial way to reach out to an audience. You can post about the day’s events, subjects you feel strongly about, development or news related to business, and much more.
This way, your followers can get a better idea of who you are as a person. And eventually, you can create a distinctive personality solely through social posting. The next time you wonder why personal branding is important, look at all the social media influencers and how they’re benefitting from their online presence.
Sending out emailers and newsletters
Sending emails is another smart way of marketing yourself as a brand. It is as good as personally talking to interested people about your journey, plans, and more.
How? Emails let you reach a targeted audience that you know is interested in knowing more about you. Thus, increasing the credibility of your brand is easily done with emailers and newsletters.
Curating a digital portfolio
Digital portfolios can come as a boon to entrepreneurs. They give you a free space to bring all your work together and represent it to the world the way you like. Let’s take an example — for creative professionals, platforms like Behance and Pinterest are exemplary.
These sites have high credibility and bring you customers by going through your work. Thus, being present on such platforms can help people understand your work quality and bring in business.
If you follow all the steps accurately, you will successfully make yourself a space in digital media. And once you get there, this is how you move forward.
How to make the best of personal branding?
Have a consistent online presence
The most important aspect of brand reputation management service is to keep your presence constant and enjoyable. By publishing a blog every week or posting on social media every now and then, you keep your users engaged.
This way, they can also stay updated about your projects, meetings/events you’re attending, and more. Let’s also think of it this way. If you fail to keep consistency with your social profiles but your competitors post often, users are likely to forget about you and follow the next person.
Thus, it is important to stay in the know of digital trends and follow them whenever you can.
Indulge in social media promotion
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer the option of paid promotion of posts. We insist that you make it a habit to set some budget aside for the same. The more you promote your profile, the more users will come across it.
Eventually, it will lead to a substantial following. With abundant people following you on social media, you get many perks.
Companies will like to collaborate with you. You will be able to reach out to the widest audience within seconds. Everything you believe in and try to say will be heard and acknowledged. Enticing, isn’t it?
Follow a content strategy
Content lies at the heart of any material you find online. This makes content curation one of the most critical personal branding strategies. Rather than being careless and abrupt about what you post on social media, follow a precise strategy.
Remember that the content you post has to be well thought of and should not hurt anyone’s sentiments.
Additionally, posting informative and relevant posts will gather the largest digital crowd. We believe that a balance between entertainment and knowledge is the right way to tread down the path of content formation.
Make vlogs and podcasts
We’re glad to tell you, research shows that 1/3rd of all online activity consists of watching videos. Moreover, Forbes said in an article that half a billion people watch videos every day on Facebook.
As evident, video content does extremely well amongst the audience. Be it a live session, a vlog, or a podcast series, users love to engage into videos they find interesting. Thus, sharing your entrepreneurial journey through videos will fetch you a generous response.
Decide on offline networking
Offline networking involves everything you do off the digital platform. Attending industry meetings and conferences, going for events, supporting a cause in public all fall under the same.
Remember that an offline network works as much magic as the one online. Word of mouth, press, and other materialistic means of branding for entrepreneurs are just as effective. Thus, by making the best of them, you can build a supportive network for the business.
Invest in professional content and photography
Let’s say, you have a clothing brand, or run an architecture firm, or are a tattoo artist. Every entrepreneur, regardless of their business type, can benefit from good content and high-quality photographs.
The two features make a sophisticated brand impression. Moreover, they also help promote your product or services in the finest manner. Any user would like to go through a social media profile or website that is pretty to the eye. So, do the needful.
Hire a brand developer
Finally, it is okay to accept that all the tasks mentioned above are difficult to fulfil at a go. This is why, in such cases, seeking the support of a professional is always a good idea. We recommend that you hire a brand developer in India, so that all your personal branding needs can be catered to efficiently.
They can come up with strategies to market your brand and you in a way that seems the most suitable for your audience. More importantly, a professional set of eyes can help in bringing out the best in you and your work.
They can take care of the content you publish on social media, in your podcasts, on your website and more. Thus, by handing over all responsibility to a professional, you can breathe lighter and get better results at the same time.
Before You Go
With a worthy investment of some time and money, personal branding can take your business to the next level. As you see, with it, you have nothing to lose. We hope you have already made up your mind about being the next well-known entrepreneur.
RareDevs is a branding agency in Ahmedabad, and our heart lies in everything that has to do with marketing and branding. If you need any further help or tips on entrepreneur branding, we are just a call away. Reach out and we can have a good chat about all things digital that interest you.
Originally published at raredevs.weebly.com.
