How Personal Branding Can Increase and Expand Your Business

First of all, what is this famous personal Branding?

There is a lot of talking around personal branding, but only a few people know exactly what it is, and how they can use it for their business’ purpose.
Having a successful personal brand means that you have learned or discovered how you promote yourself, and consequently whatever business you’re running. Gaining this type of self — promotion it isn’t a task that can be accomplished in a couple of weeks. It requires a precise mix of experience, competence, and skills in what you do. The questions you should answer are:

• What am I exceptionally good at in my field?
• What does it make myself and my work unique?
• What are the values that better defines who I am and what I do?
• How am I different form the competition?
• What is my positioning in the market?

You want the world — or at least the people in your field — knowing you, not because you require it to bow your presence, but because a professional as you are wants to make his business succeed. Moreover, for personal branding, the business that needs to succeed is your own persona.

Using personal branding in the right way means telling your story, your experience, your accomplishments, your passion and your succesful case studies.

The main goal of personal branding is making you stand as an authority in a specific branch.

If you can count on a team, like ours at Targeto, able to help you reaching this goal in the right way, defining who you are will be strictly connected on what you do. You have to put a unique sign on your work. It won’t matter if others offer the same service you do, because… well, they won’t be you, they won’t have strong characterisation.

You are the Authority of your field, the leader to follow and everyone is going to approach you to make business with you!

Think about it: corporates and Fortune 500 have their own branding, but it’s referred to an entire business, not to someone in particular. For example, you know that on Pinterest, you’ll find whatever type of image you can desire. That’s their brand: they offer you pictures that you can save and organise. However, you don’t know who is the person or the team that works to improve the pinboards. Their style can be unique, their work excellent, but at the end of the day, you don’t think about Team X, you think about how cool is Pinterest.

For an entrepreneur, having a strong personal brand determines to have the opportunity to attract both customers and general recognition of their skill. When their audience thinks about them, they know what this person does well, where they can be found, why it’s worth having business with them or listening to them. They’re not, Person X!
Now, speaking professionally, your brand is the perception that an audience has of you. It’s a combination of what people find about you online, what your business does, what type of interaction you have with others.

Before the Internet Era, having a personal brand for many people who weren’t politics or working with traditional media, revolved around having a portfolio of works and a well — crafted business card.

Today, business card has been substituted by the websites, and people want to find your portfolio online. It’s easy to reach, anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Time changed, and so did personal branding.

Here are some reasons you should take into account when pondering if you need to build or strengthen your personal brand:

• Simply being online, having a “nice” website isn’t enough anymore — your profile and work’s value risk to get lost among the hundreds of voices that ask to be listened to.
• Defining who you are as a business and what you do better or in a more effective way than others helps you to establish a unique identity in the same field where your competitors work. In this way, whoever will want the particular service you offer will know that you are the person they should look for.
• You want to identify and know your ideal audience, and you want to match their beliefs or needs, since, let’s say this once more, you need personal branding to improve your business.
• Ironically, to do so, you need to distance yourself from a behaviour too much sale — oriented. You want to offer more than a simple cold call for a purchase. Because nowadays what it works better is the offer of an entire experience — read more about this point here.

However, how is personal brand built? What helps people recognising you as an authority in what you do? Let’s see:

• Hire a professional to design your logo. Now that even Google research shows the logos next to the websites’ titles, a personalised logo is a vital necessity to help people associated you quickly with the business you’re conducting.
• Select a range of matching colours and fonts that will be associated with your business and use that. It’s an excellent help for customer’s memory, knowing which aspect your website and social channels generally have. For example, if you see a white “f” on a blue background, you know that’s Facebook’s logo. And you also know that Apple builds its channels using a considerable quantity of white background and minimalistic approach.
• Act matching the expectations of the audience you want to appeal. For example, if you’re going to sell your vegetarian cooking course, sharing on your social channels — the official ones you use for work — photos of yourself cooking bacon or showing your support for the Meatballs Festival is going to put your audience off. The values your brand carry are your manifesto, and to be sure to acquire and don’t lose customers, those are the rules you need to follow.
• Remember that social branding follows you in your everyday life. This aspect shouldn’t be a huge problem, because you don’t want to lie to your customer since in the Internet Era you’ll be quickly discovered and damaged by it. It’s legit for them expecting someone that wants to attract customers in a specific pool would adhere to at least the significant values of that audience. Think about the damage — and the drama — that derive when some politic is discovered acting against the values they promote in their party. If you want the votes of foreigners living in your Country, you shouldn’t talk about closing borders or building walls. Same for a brand. If you own a chain of hotels and want to attract families, family-friendly spaces and activities are a must have in your buildings.

As you can see, personal branding gives you the power to improve your business while becoming a prominent figure in your field.

This improvement means that your advantages won’t be only about money and profit, but also in terms of recognition. Become an influential voice and your business’ prosperity will follow accordingly.

Now, you can also see that building and/or developing a personal brand isn’t a journey a busy entrepreneur can make alone. It requires time and tactic building a proper stage where to show online what you can do and how well you can do it.

For this reason, Targeto, our Digital Advertising Agency, offers, among other services the possibility to implement your personal brand, if you have one, or to improve it.

You can find all the details here and if you’re not sure, why don’t you schedule a free session with our team of experts? It’s free, you can pick whatever time is more suitable for you and will answer to all your questions. Click here!