Your personal brand has never been more important.
You are not just competing with the one expert down the road anymore, but with experts and industry influencers from across the globe, and now with the rise of easily available artificial intelligence, robots.
This doesn’t mean that your business chances are low but it does mean that your company and proposition needs to be more unique and needs to stand out amongst the battle cries.
This means capitalising on the individual unique quirks and personalities as well as the experiences that makes us us and inputting that into our business marketing strategy.
A personal brand lives both outside of the company sphere and inside it so a strong personal brand benefits both the individual and the company that individual is a part of.
If you have not yet started your personal brand, this article will talk you through five actionable steps which will help prepare you to win. Once you have completed all these, you will have a good starting point but that’s all it will be, a starting point. Make sure you are subscribed to the blog to stay updated for when the next blogs on personal branding are released.
1. Pick your game
You need to choose which platform you need to be on. Note I said need and not want because this should be decided by who your target audience is!
If you are appealing to millennials, there is high chance you don’t need to be on Snapchat. Your best bet would be Facebook.
If you are targeting working individuals in a specific industry, LinkedIn would be a good place to start.
Now in an ideal world, you would be on all platforms to catch everyone but that isn’t necessarily sustainable from a time and energy perspective so start by being specific about who you want to target and where the majority of them will be.
2. Choose your character
There are so many amazing people in this world doing some pretty incredible things and finding innovative solutions to people’s problem.
Throw in the rise of AI, which means anything generic is out the window.
This means your personal brand has never been more important.
A good place to start is to figure out what your why is.
- Why do you do what you do?
- What are your passions?
- What are your hopes?
- What are you good at?
- What are your values?
I recommend journaling about this and really simplifying it so that your few sentences truly portray a strong why and who you are because this will elevate and drive your whole personal brand.
3. Choose your armour
This is what you look like. Branding is not just about your message, it’s also about how package that message. Pick a strong colour scheme with imagery that embodies your message.
First you need to pick your colours. You can either just pick one that you like, one that is common in your industry (this will usally be for a reason), or one which is not common (to stand out, but again this might not have been picked for a reason). You can also get a little more technical by looking to colour wheels and colour psychology. I’ve popped two wheels down below and their related articles if you wanted to read further into this.
Now head over to Adobe Colour, this is free. Plug that colour in and lock it in as the base colour. Then play around with the options until you find a colour combination that you like. Take note of the html and rgb codes and add that to your brand guidelines. Or if you don’t have any brand guidelines, that will make get you started with some.
You can also decide at this point whether you want to use graphics/illustrations (just as ones you can find on Canva, or by hiring an animator), or stock photos or photos you take yourself, or just block colours and shapes.
4. Choose your appearance
Now choose your profile photo for the platform. I recommend using the same one ensuring that the photo shows your face clearly, and that you look approachable. A nice hack to make your profile picture stand out and be more on brand is to follow these steps here:
5. Prepare for battle
Set up your the platforms you have chosen to be on using your new branding. This includes profile photos, branding and a nifty tagline derived from step 2.
6. Go to war
Now is the time to start pumping out quality content which is in line with your brand, who you are, your message and what you stand for.
Good luck, brave Warrior
Hyped! Health Marketing 