Your personal brand is your promise of value. It helps you stand apart from your competitors, your colleagues, and your peers. Personal branding is not just about framing a unique, artificial picture for the outside world, it is about portraying the distinct amalgamation of cogent and poignant features that you possess. All these features, including your strengths, talents, values, and obsessions, are used to differentiate you and to guide your career decisions.
Your Name Matters
"What's in a name?" some say, but they ignore the value of names at their own peril. Our names have a grand value in our lives. Treating another person's name with dignity will make him feel gratified and encourage him to treasure his name as his most valued possession. Treat his name with respect and you will gain his respect, and vice versa.
The Keys to Successful Personal Branding
- Visualize your brand. "To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act," says French novelist Anatole France. Create your brand framework. Envision your goals. Then begin the assessment process and build up your brand.
- Identify yourself. Authenticity is critical to establishing a booming personal brand. For better branding, get to know yourself better. If you are innovative, vibrant, and extroverted, you will not win by communicating the traits of being conventional, dull, and quiet.
- Identify your competitors. You cannot be prominent if you do not know who your colleagues or rivals are. Find out if your competitors are at your present workplace or within your industry. Consider both your own goals and your competition. If you are planning major career changes, then your present colleagues are not your competitors. If you are aiming for a senior post in your current company, identifying competitors and their brand features should be fairly uncomplicated.
- Focus on your target audience. Identifying the traits of your target audience helps you craft your communication accordingly, helping you to understand how and where you can reach your audience.
- Convey yourself. Describe the essence of your brand while creating a personal brand profile. List your brand features, prepare a brand statement, and create a personal brand tagline.
- Blend well. You can discover the ultimate arrangement of communications tools that get in touch with your audience effectively, only when you become acquainted with yourself, your competitors, and your goals. All possible communications tools must be evaluated, and the right combination must be selected to reach your target audience.
- Connect your brand to everything. Remember never to leave your brand behind, not even when you are participating in a meeting, writing a report, giving a presentation, or going on a business trip.
- Eat your brand, drink your brand. Give yourself a period of at least two weeks to become accustomed to your brand. Check to see if everything that you do during that period — the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the articles you use during the day, etc. — is consistent with your brand.
- Assess and progress. Once your brand becomes recognized, and the communication skills needed to reach your target audience are developed, start measuring your brand's success.
So, go on, mold yourself into a brand and feel the difference.
