If you want to advance your business or career in 2023, it’s time to start putting more effort into building your personal brand. Your personal brand is critical to manage in our online-driven world. When people look your name up online, things last forever, whether they’re good or bad, making personal branding essential.
If you’ve ever Googled your name, you may have an idea of what your personal brand is, and it’s possible you don’t like it. It’s also possible that you don’t have much of a consistent, cohesive brand reflecting who you are in a professional sense.
If you don’t have a brand, or you have one that you don’t feel is indicative of who you are in your professional life in particular, the following are seven tips to help you build it in 2023 or update it.
1. Create a Personal Branding Statement
If you don’t already have one, developing a personal branding statement can be an excellent way to start to structure the rest of how you want to be perceived in your professional life. Your personal branding statement can be simple, and it should define who you are, what your values are, and how you want people to see you.
Try to limit your statement to 1-3 sentences that sum up your experience, your skills, and what you’re passionate about.
This is like a slogan for yourself, and it forms the foundation of everything else you’ll do to build your personal brand.
2. Strategize
Just as a business does with its brand, you need a strategy for how you want your own personal brand to be conveyed.
As part of your strategy, ask yourself a few questions. Start with who you want to reach. Maybe you work as a freelancer and want to reach more clients, or perhaps you’re hoping to make a career change in 2023, so you want recruiters and hiring managers to be your primary audience.
From there, think about how you plan to reach them, why you want to do so, and what your message is going to be when you do.
You also need to establish core values for yourself. When you have core values, you build your brand around them, and that, in turn, creates brand alignment, so you become more recognizable to your targeted audience
As you think about your core values, give consideration to how each one aligns with a problem you hope to solve for your targeted audience.
3. Establish Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition is what you uniquely have to offer. You should have an idea of where you’re going with this because you already should have created your personal branding statement.
Your value proposition identifies who you can best serve through your unique skills, and if you’re going to create content to share online, you use your value proposition to guide that.
4. Identity Your Ideal Audience
This was briefly touched on above, but it’s important to know your audience when you build your personal brand. This will help you shape how you speak to them and where you spend time marketing to them online.
5. Create Content with Value
You want to position yourself as sa professional who has the ability to offer your targeted audience, no matter who that might be, value.
Show them that you have value to offer through the content you create.
You want to create relevant, shareable, informative content. You want to provide solutions to your targeted audience for problems they might be facing.
If you’re a copywriter, for example, you can start to blog on topics related to business writing and address some of the common issues that people have related to their content creation from the perspective of an expert.
6. Create or Revamp Your Personal Site
If you don’t already have an existing personal website, it’s important that you create one.
Creating a personal website will give you a centralized repository for your brand. This is where it all comes together. It’s the place you can show your value, build out your branding strategy, create content that offers value, and essentially organize your brand cohesively.
If you already have a personal site, but it’s not achieving all of those objectives, use 2023 as the chance to change that.
7. Create Video Content
Finally, we already talked about the importance of adding value through content for your personal brand. In 2023, integrate video content into your strategy. When you create YouTube videos, these may be prioritized by Google, plus YouTube is the second-largest search engine.
You’re also putting a face to your brand, and you might be appealing to a broader audience if you expand the type of content you create.