What is Personal Branding and How to Get Started

Personal Branding refers to the ability to identify, enhance and promote one's personal assets to an audience by communicating effectively what distinguishes us from others in terms of technical and relational skills, experiences, behavior, values, personality and style.

Professionally it is the perception that others have of you and, by extension, of your products/services, as well as your ability to positively influence this perception.

Why Personal Branding?

In a globalized market, which is highly competitive and fluid, you need to differentiate yourself and communicate well. With the right channels and the reasons why your audience should choose you over others, a strong personal Brand Identity can conquer the minds of customers, create trust, broaden your audience and thus make a business grow significantly.

"You will be seen as a top expert in a sector, niche or area of ​​expertise and this will help to increase the trust of the audience towards the brand you represent," states Eloisa Marchesoni, widely known as the top expert in disruptive technologies.

Within most companies, the development of the Personal Brand of entrepreneurs is hardly applied. An entrepreneurs personal brand could instead bring benefits to the products and services associated with their names or to those produced by the companies for which they work.

These benefits include:

• Greater trust;
• Visibility;
• Greater business opportunities.

How To Do Personal Branding?

There are many subjects to whom to relegate the development and promotion of a Personal Brand, which should be part of a broader marketing strategy, and consultants like us are just one of the best options for that. Whatever the chosen path, this cannot be separated from considering some practical and useful advice.

The starting point must be an introspective analysis of yourself and your business. This will allow you to identify and define what your current assets are (skills and qualifications, passions and interests, values ​​and beliefs).

Based on these assets, you will then define what your mission is and your vision and, most importantly, what is the message you want to convey. Finally, you will have to decide which traits of your personality your self-brand should reflect and understand in which area of ​​the market to place yourself. Once this is done, you will end up with the value proposition with which you differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Promotion of Your Personal Brand

The promotional phase may include the implementation of conventional and non-conventional marketing strategies, which fall under the name of growth hacking, and the use of different channels which include:

1. Content Marketing

The production and free distribution of quality and useful content for your target audience is one of the most effective ways to build your personal brand and become an authority in the market in which you propose yourself.

2. Storytelling

Behind every business there is vision, passion, courage, competence, experience and emotion; there is a story to tell that the audience wants to hear. Storytelling is an excellent form of communication with which to communicate a brand to a specific audience.

3. Social networking

The various social platforms are an extraordinary means for promoting a Personal Brand (LinkedIn posts, Facebook ads, Instagram stories, Tik Tok videos, Twitch live streams) and their importance cannot be ignored. For this reason, optimize your social profiles starting from Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram and build around your Personal Brand a community to lead and with which to interact and share content. 

4. Blogging

A blog or personal site is also a business card, the first touchpoint with which the audience interacts and draws its judgment on the brand and business. Particular attention must therefore be paid to the optimization of some key elements of the homepage and the landing pages of the site.

5. Visibility

Another important component to think about when doing Personal Branding online is related to putting in place an effective brand visibility strategy. This can basically be obtained immediately through the purchase of paid advertising, but, in the medium to long term, the best options are SEO and Growth Hacking techniques.

Other ways to gain visibility are as follows:

• Digital PR;
• Guest blogging;
• Public Speaking (Conferences, Company events etc.)

Personal Branding: Books

Here are some recommended book titles about Personal Branding:

1. Seth Godin - The purple cow. Get noticed (and make a fortune) in an all brown world.

Seth Godin explains how to put a Purple Cow (something phenomenal) in everything you conceive to arrive at a product solution that will be memorable.

2. Sean Ellis - Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success.

Sean Ellis explains how Hacking Growth provides a compelling answer to today's urgent need for speed, offering companies a methodology to quickly increase their market share.

3. Giacomo Arcaro - Fake It 'till You Make It. 

(To be published in November 2020)

In his upcoming book, Giacomo explains that "acting "as if" needs to be a big part of any personal branding strategy. It is about changing one's behavior first and trusting the feelings will follow, as long as the motivation is in the right place."