Essential Aspect of managing a personal branding process
I understood early on that the training I was offering senior managers, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and corporate professionals in regards to public speaking or career transitions relates to a larger professional requirement. Professionals need to make their expertise, values and passions known in order to stand out in their respective fields.
My intuition has always been that learning to speak efficiently in public and using social media instruments effectively is not enough in order to build an authentic personal brand. The basis of true personal branding is a coherent strategy.
In order to best help the professional I used to work with, I pursued courses and workshops with the best personal branding experts in order to find top strategies, both for me and my clients. I have also drawn on my personal experience with transitioning from the corporate world to entrepreneurship. I never disregard the challenges I has to overcome in building an authentic personal brand.
As such, in order to build an authentic personal brand do not make the mistake of most local professionals who communicate everything to everybody on all channels at their disposal. Align your brand with your mission and strategy in order to target a specific set of potential clients useful to your business.
Before embarking on any personal branding process, you need to know yourself, to understand and be confident in the value you can bring along with everything you do. You must clarify your mission and only then are you ready to start thinking about how to communicate through different channels with your clients, who are interested in you, not in “mass communication”.
If the idea of taking a step forward and showing the world that you can make a difference – Congratulations! I am happy for you! Here are some suggestions I hope will prove useful:
- Before doing anything you believe is necessary in cultivating your personal brand (logo, visuals, social media presence, etc), you need to dig deep within yourself and undergo a process of introspection. This means asking yourself essential questions, asking friends, mentors or a coach for help. This process should help you understand what you can really offer differently on a market where other professionals do the same thing. Thus, look deeply and honestly within, and try answering question which you have not asked yourself for a while…
- What are your passions? Which are the subject you would debate endlessly? Which are the aspects relating to your work that you like best?
- Which are the special talents that differentiate you from other professionals in your field/
- Which are the values and principles that govern your life? Which would be the situations that anger you because they trespass against your core values?
- Your role in humanity. This may sound idealistic, but what you are doing had better connect to some degree to the way in which you would like to personally contribute to the world around, regardless of your career. So, if you were to define the mission of your personal brand, what would it be? What is your dream?
Only after clarifying these core aspects will you be able to move on to developing a communication strategy for your personal brand. This will involve a series of channels adapted to the services we offer and to your target audience.
At the end of the day we all need to reach for the diamond in the rough within, discover it, polish it and then show it to the world in all its splendor from its best angle.