How do you build a brand?

I get asked a lot about how to build your personal brand. If you were a product on the shelf, what would your wrapper say? Why would I buy you?

Often it’s about taking time to understand your strengths, whether that’s through an assessment tool or your own experiences and evaluations.

You want to be consistent with the keywords that the employer is looking for. Take their job description into a word cloud. What are the words that appear the most frequently? Now build your story around demonstrating YOUR quantifiable results in sought after keywords. You want to be the solution to their needs/problems.

1. Decide what you want you want your brand to be.

So some of the questions to ask yourself are:

• What are you really good at, what makes you unique? How do you stand out from your industry?
• What are you passionate about?
• What do you want your name to be associated with?
• What do you want your brand to represent?

2. Decide what your niche is.

Who is your audience. Knowing who you want your audience to be, and who you’ll be targeting your content/brand to, will give you higher engagement.

3. Be consistent.

Create content that is valuable to your target audience. You need to make sure what you’re putting out there is adding value for your audience.

4. Add valuable insights/topics to conversations/results

Stay current. Look at content that is trending and see how you can tweak or enhance your content to follow trends and meet audience expectations. 

Go through your existing content and see what has good engagement, what people want to see more of, and what has bad engagement, what didn’t resonate with your existing community. After all, it is your existing community that will be sharing and commenting on your future content and bringing more eyeballs to it.

Once you have your brand position and your unique value proposition figured out, you can start putting yourself out there as a subject matter expert and finding opportunities to increase your visibility.