Building and promoting a personal brand: practical advice

Business today — means fierce competition in every field, where companies are backed by strong trademarks and their products can be practically identical. To stand out from competitors, companies build USPs, improve the quality of their goods or services and narrow or widen their niche. 

There is another route, however, through a personal brand, the creation and promotion of which lets you not only sell a product but also make a name for yourself. It is an effective marketing tool for widening your target audience and increasing its loyalty. 

Table of contents:

• What a personal brand is and why it matters
• Why you need to build and promote a personal brand
• Who a personal brand suits
• Studying your target audience and defining what makes you unique
• Finding your audience
• Developing a personal message and a Tone of Voice
• Creating a profile on social media and other platforms.
• Creating a site or a blog to strengthen your personal brand

What a personal brand is and why it matters

Put simply, a personal brand answers 2 questions: how many people know about you and what they think of you. It rests on professionalism, reputation, the way you communicate, personal qualities, the ideas you broadcast and even the way you dress. All of those factors have to match your way of life completely. Do not say or do things that are not in your nature, because the audience will see it and you will lose your reputation.

Why does building a personal brand matter? Here is an example: Steve Jobs and Maxim Ilyahov. The name alone immediately tells us that we are looking at the founder of Apple and the populariser of the «info style» of writing. And even people who have no iPhone and write no copy know it. That is exactly where the power of a personal brand lies: instead of faceless trademarks, people attach themselves to ordinary human beings and their values, and connect those values with a product.

Why you need to build and promote a personal brand

Promotion through a personal brand helps solve specific business problems. With it you can:

• Increase the price of your services or product.

People are ready to pay for a brand. If two absolutely identical electric cars appear on the market, the second will cost more — simply because the first was presented by a little-known manufacturer and the second — by Elon Musk. 

• Increase recognition of yourself and your company.

When choosing between two specialists, clients are more likely to turn to the one they have heard of before and can find information about online or in the media.

• Attract a target audience and build trusting relationships with it.

When it is not a faceless company in the media space but a living person, that attracts new clients who like their personal qualities and values. Communicating those values also answers every objection and helps build an audience of like-minded people around you.

• Build useful connections.

Personal branding — is a path to meeting various experts, opinion leaders, leading manufacturers and advertisers. It also opens new employment opportunities, because every company wants to hire a widely known specialist who will raise its own profile.

• Make it easier to find partners.

With a personal brand it is easier to find investors and partners for your own projects than it is as an unknown entrepreneur.

Who a personal brand suits

Personal branding suits people in a wide range of professions. It is an effective way of promoting yourself as a freelancer, an entrepreneur, an expert in your field, a teacher or a media figure. 

The tool is useful for employees too. As an example, take the niche of real estate agencies in Türkiye. In the usual situation an anonymous sales manager talks to clients. They know neither the level of that person's professionalism nor their style of communication. It is a different matter when an employee has built a personal brand that also communicates their company's values.

Personal branding also helps you move up the career ladder. With it you can stand out from colleagues and are more likely to be noticed by management.

Not everyone, however, will be suited to promoting a personal brand. There will be no result if you have no goal that justifies building one and you are not ready:

• to spend your own time, money and energy on promoting it;
• to be an expert in your field;
• for public life and for dealing with negativity (and there will certainly be some).

A personal brand — is not a working solution for every occasion that suits absolutely everyone. Developing and maintaining one takes a significant amount of time, money and energy. It also requires discipline and responsibility, because being public does not let you simply go on holiday for a long time and forget about social media. Otherwise be prepared to be forgotten yourself.

Studying your target audience and defining what makes you unique

The first step in building a personal brand is settling on your positioning. To do that, answer the following questions honestly and in detail: 

• «What do I want to be associated with?».
• «In which field am I an expert?».
• «What goals am I pursuing?».
• «How do I differ from my competitors?».

These questions help you shape your value and the message you will broadcast. What makes you unique can also be the way you engage with your audience or present your content. Those become the key elements of the image that forms in people's minds.

Finding your audience

The success of personal branding depends largely on the answer to the question: «Who am I working for?». That is what lets you define your target audience. The clients of a real estate agency in Türkiye, for example, may be young families or people on a middle income looking for apartments to live in or to invest in, but not unemployed students. It is important here to understand correctly which needs and requirements of that audience your product or service meets, so that you do not get your promotion strategy wrong.

When defining your audience you can also focus on particular target groups that serve different business needs:

• clients — most of the content is created for them;
• the wider audience — it sustains your media weight and can bring new clients;
• the media — working with the press lets you attract its loyal audience to your brand;
• colleagues and partners — with them you can run collaborations, create joint products and exchange experience;
• niche influencers — they have a large audience that could potentially become yours. With their help you can also find partners or be published in brand media and the press.

Developing a personal message and a Tone of Voice

At the heart of a personal brand promotion strategy lies the personal message you convey to your audience. You will broadcast it throughout your professional life in order to set yourself apart from competitors and find the audience it is useful to. A real estate agency in Türkiye, for example, can convey its value in the message «Property in Türkiye is profitable and accessible» or «Living in Türkiye is comfortable, and investing there — is profitable».

It is also worth working out your Tone of Voice (ToV) — the style in which you talk to your audience. The main requirement for it — is that it matches you, so that the personal brand is sincere and easily recognised among competitors. A ToV can be businesslike, formal, blunt or friendly. It all depends on your audience and your positioning. 

A simple way of making your brand voice more distinctive — is to add original phrases, words and hashtags to your content that appear only with you. It is important that your Tone of Voice stays the same across every social network.

Creating a profile on social media and other platforms.

Social media — are the main tool for promoting a personal brand, the channel through which you talk to your audience. When choosing a suitable platform it is worth following a simple rule: the more of them you have, the better. You do not have to run every network actively, however. Choose the ones where the largest part of your target audience is and duplicate the content from them to the rest.

To make a personal brand more recognisable it is worth following this advice:

• the same photograph on every network, changed rarely or never;
• as much information filled in on the profile as possible;
• clickable links to your other networks, your site and your blog.

It is also worth choosing the type of personal brand in advance:

• provocative — publishing scandalous content connected with your private life;
• expert — publishing content connected with your service or product;
• mixed — publishing not only expert content but personal content too.

A good example of mixed personal branding — is the Instagram account of Yulia Baidan, director of the real estate agency Profit Real Estate. She not only describes the finer points of buying a home in Türkiye and covers events in the country, but also shares her thoughts and values with her audience. Thanks to that, potential clients see that they are dealing with an ordinary person and can connect that image with the company.

An important point! It is best if all the social media accounts and blogs are run by you. To save time you can of course hire a copywriter, but they will not be able to reproduce your style of communication exactly, and that is critically important for creating a distinctive image. As an option you can dictate the text, but then it has to be checked against your ToV before publication.

Creating a site or a blog to strengthen your personal brand

If you run many social media accounts, you can create a business-card site to strengthen your personal brand. It will carry links to every platform, interview and webinar. You can also tell people about yourself, introducing visitors to you straight away and showing what value you offer. For the property niche in Türkiye, for example, you can publish the best properties or cases describing how a home was selected for a client and the finer points of support during the purchase.

A site is also suitable for announcing new content and for connecting analytics, so that you can understand how and where your traffic comes from.

If social media formats do not suit your content and the site already exists, you can start a blog. It is labour-intensive, but articles reaching the top of search results are guaranteed to attract a large number of followers and clients. You can run a blog yourself or hire a copywriter. In the first case you save money on staff, and in the second — time and energy. 

When building a personal brand it is important to stay yourself. It is a long process that requires patience and persistence. Follow market trends, improve your skills and do not forget your target audience. All of that helps you make yourself known to the world and increase recognition of both yourself and your product.