We live in an age where news travels to high speed and they are more and more numerous even if the time for information is increasingly scarce.

To be able to communicate better and it quickly became a real necessity. And this is also true in communication and sponsorship of oneself.

To be able to communicate better and it quickly became a real necessity. And this is also true in communication and sponsorship of oneself.

Promote yourself by presenting your own best picture it is the fundamental key to the success of every agency and every marketer.

In fact, Branding is not a prerogative intended exclusively for companies, but the Personal Branding becomes a point in favor for individuals.

 

 

What does it mean to do Personal Branding? It means marketing yourself.

The single individual can in fact work on own image as if it were a brand, to emerge and stand out from others by focusing on good communication of one's qualities, skills and work.

Personal Branding, therefore, is nothing more thanset of those strategies aimed at promoting oneself in the best possible way: marketing techniques and strategies are exploited in reference to a real person and not to a company.

The ultimate goal is therefore that these personal branding operations lead the subject to remain imprinted in the minds of individuals and organizations, just like brands in the minds of consumers.

Personal branding means placing yourself in the mind of a consumer.

 

 

How to create a Personal Branding strategy

How it works for marketing for companies and for brands, also for Personal Branding there is no single strategy and valid for all.

However, we can identify some golden rules which would be good to follow in any Personal Branding strategy. Let's find out together!

1. Focus on your target. As it happens for brands it is important have a defined target to contact. Once you have identified your target audience, it is necessary to create a communication strategy capable of capturing the interest of your target.
2. Be genuine. The foundation of Personal Branding is certainly the authenticity, the communication strategy must in fact be based on the best of oneself and not on an invented character. In fact, building a false personality to promote risks not stimulating a sense of trust on the part of the public and leads to being false and not real, thus damaging one's image.
3. Tell a story. As with corporate brands, it is also in the field of personal branding storytelling is a fundamental factor for the construction of theengagementwith your audience. The story you are going to tell must be as interesting as possible, useful and in line with your target.
4. Be consistent. To be credible in the eyes of your audience, there must always be coherence between your online and offline personality: you must tell a real story and not build a fictional character! You cannot improvise or even flaunt skills, qualities or experiences that you don't really have. It is therefore necessary to always maintain a balance between the story of oneself and one's profession and ostentation and self-referentiality.
5. Accept failure. To build a winning personal branding strategy it is necessary to try and adjust the game. Mistakes do not represent defeat, but they are the way to learn and achieve success.
6. Create a positive impact. Search for be empathetic and to build a positive community around you by building genuine relationships with those around you. This positive attitude will help you build a long-term brand.
7. Follow success stories. See who is around you and see the characters who have achieved success thanks to their personal branding strategies. Carefully analyzing the context of social platforms will allow you to make the most of all the trends of the moment to promote yourself.
8. Get others to talk. Personal branding is also successful through word of mouth: when others start talking about you, they help increase interest and engagement in your person. Also for this reason it is always important to create a solid network of contacts and relationships around your personal brand.

 

The tools for digital Personal Branding

Our reputation and the management of our image are two related factors, especially in the online world. In fact, the channels through which the Personal Branding are mainly online ones. So let's try to discover the tools to better promote yourself, on channels traveled and used by millions of users, and the tips to not remain one among many!

First of all, it is essential to reflect on yourself by putting in place a real one SWOT analysis. In English the acronym SWOT refers to strengths (strengths), ai weaknesses (weaknesses), alle opportunity (opportunities) and at threats (threats). The analysis of these four characteristics represents the starting point for the creation of a personal brand and for its development in a key of success. Only by knowing yourself will you be able to implement a winning promotional strategy.

The second step is building a website or a professional blog through which you can share thoughts and reflections that convey the idea of ​​a genuine personality capable of inspiring trust in others. When creating your website, remember to choose a theme consistent with the message you want to convey and opt for an independent domain that clearly presents the brand, for example using your name and surname.

Image is everything and it is therefore essential to create one visual style easily recognizable by all. First you could think of your logo, perhaps built on the basis of the letters of your name or your interests. Even the color choices have their own impact in personal branding: creating a palette with a few identifying colors is a practical and effective idea.

How to do Personal Branding with social media

The purpose of Personal Branding is to promote the individual not only in the context of work but also in the more personal sphere. For this reason it is important that there is coherence between the identity of the offline world and that spread virally through the various online channels. Furthermore, the identity that is promoted must always be functional to the objectives that one has chosen to achieve and to one's target.

In this context, it is therefore essential to exploit the social networks to promote their personal image. Let's see together how to make the most of the different social platforms:

1. Facebook is one of the most popular social networks and allows you to get in touch with a huge number of users. When you decide to use Facebook for your personal branding strategy, it is necessary to evaluate whether it is convenient to open a personal profile or a company page. In both cases it is always essential create content in line with your target audience; also you have to pay attention to the network of profiles and pages with which to interact, these must also be in line with your personal brand.
2. Twitter has a smaller audience than the social network giant, Facebook, and has a limitation in the number of characters that can be exploited in each post. On Twitter it is therefore important to be concise and use hashtags and tags to increase engagement. For consolidate your presence on Twitter it is not enough to publish a simple tweet a day: create interesting and engaging threads, with informative and informative content, or take advantage of the trend topics in line with your brand to involve a greater number of users.
3. YouTube and Pinterest they are two social networks often considered secondary, but in reality they have great potential in terms of personal branding if used in the correct way. These two social channels in fact take advantage of the visual aspect: YouTube is the ideal platform to promote yourself through video-tutorial e vlog, Pinterest is ideal for sharing images accompanied by very short descriptions.
4. Instagram offers the possibility of sharing content in the form of posts, Reels videos or Stories and this variety represents enormous potential for personal branding strategies. The Instagram Stories in fact, they allow you to bring your audience into your everyday life. This way you can convey a sincere and genuine image of yourself. In addition, the features related to Instagram professional profiles will allow you to monitor your target audience and better structure your promotion strategy.

All of these social channels offer different self-promotion techniques through which sell yourself as the best "product" to choose in a real perspective of self packaging. 

In Personal Branding you must always put your face on it.

To be successful, don't limit yourself to just one social network: evaluate which ones may be best suited to your promotion strategy and use their characteristics to create a successful personal brand. In fact, today thanks to social media, we are in the presence of a technological and communicative revolution, where anyone can get involved by exposing yourself and presenting yourself to the public.

Social media allow you to get in touch with millions of other users and allow you to amplify the reach of each content: if exploited in the right way, they represent the tool that will allow you to emerge from the crowd.

How to do personal branding on LinkedIn

In the last few years LinkedIn it has become a social network increasingly used in a business key. To date, LinkedIn has about 9 million subscribers in Italy and guarantees direct links with qualified professionals. If used correctly, LinkedIn can be a winning tool for promoting your personal brand.

First, you need to try to personalize your profile to make it recognizable. First create one Custom URL in which your name and surname appear clearly; then move on to the cover image which must be consistent with your brand and then to the profile photo which must be professional, but at the same time captivating.

LinkedIn was born as a sort of online Curriculum Vitae in which to show one's work experiences. However, there is also space for the biography in which you can dwell on a real one personal branding statement which tells about your life experience. Furthermore, you can enrich your profile with references, videos, presentations, publications and other details to support your professional skills.

After you have carefully filled out your profile, your goal must be to live the social network to create a network of contacts around your personal brand. LinkedIn offers the possibility to publish contents of various formats, to comment and interact with the posts of other users and to join groups related to your personal interests.

On LinkedIn, as well as for other social networks, the same rule always applies: content is king. To strengthen your credibility you will need to create content in line with your brand and your target audience, capable of attracting attention and engagement from other users.

Then remember that LinkedIn, compared to the other social networks we talked about previously, presents itself as more professional and formal: try to adapt your language and your content to this context to avoid transmitting a negative image of yourself.

How to promote your company when we are the product

From the point of view of personal branding, the person becomes a "product" to be promoted and sold. As for a company, even when you take care of your figure it is therefore essential try in every way to improve judgment from others.

Also, in the sales industry it is important to create a trust relationship with its customers and this can only happen if a genuine and truthful image of the product is transmitted. Then, a customer becomes attached to the product when he knows the story that led to designing and creating it: in the same way when doing personal branding it is necessary tell your story. In this way the link with that brand will be complete, much firmer and longer lasting.

As has already been mentioned above, when we tell ourselves, we must never exaggerate. That is, we must not fall into ostentation, but we must try to remain humble as people appreciate who is most similar to them. Precisely for this reason, even in personal branding it is necessary to analyze the audience to which it is addressed.

What company do we have? Who are our customers? To achieve effective Personal Branding, you need to go hand in hand with the needs and desires of the people who are interested in our services and products. Based on the result of this analysis, an ad hoc strategy can be planned.

The identity created must be clear and homogeneous and to spread it it is necessary, as we have seen, to use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, platforms used every day by billions of active users all over the globe. Being able to emerge here it is the best way to expand and change your audience into customers.

Enhance your company by creating a quality personal branding

To do Personal Branding it is essential to study interesting and valuable content that allows the people who follow you to learn something new every day and to receive continuous and exciting stimuli.

Il content marketing  is the key to success for your personal brand, it can happen in different ways, but the important thing is that it happens!

Try to take inspiration from successful examples that operate in the same industry as you, but don't copy them! Distinguish yourself from them by communicating your ideas and experiences in a unique way through your personal point of view. Personal branding also means this: create your own "I" that is original and unique.

To do this, an effective technique to use is to always keep yourself informed about the news in the Personal Branding sector, also through publications such as “Make yourself a brand. Personal branding and online reputation", a book by Riccardo Scandellari, to always keep on the bedside table or "Everything does branding - Practical guide to personal branding" by Gioia Gottini. These books explain the enormous potential of the major social networks, how they should be exploited to our advantage, how the story of your company should be told.

It is not what you sell that matters, but the perception you create of your product. In fact, one cannot think of being able to shine in the field of the web without cultivating one's image and reputation. You have to be strategists, skilled salespeople but especially "speakers" of themselves, know how to tell without filters, even in everyday life.

Promote yourself by networking

It is not said that every day we have something to transmit, the important thing is still the fact of constantly creating content, make your professional figure known. But improving your Personal Branding also means sharing what is important to us, even if said by others.

"If I have seen further it is because I climbed on the shoulders of the giants who preceded me." Isaac Newton said

We must therefore follow the example of those who have been successful and at the same time we must be able to interact with others to participate in what is said by the public in different contexts. Improving one's figure is also this: getting closer to others and resolving doubts by conveying quality.

To promote yourself on social media it is therefore important to respond to the comments of other users and interact with their content; Furthermore, it is important to join groups in line with one's interests thanks to which it is possible to build one network of contacts in line with your target audience.

Personal Branding is very often underestimated or ignored, why? The reason is simply the fact that we focus more on the product and therefore on what it sells. However, the public, in order to be able to fully trust a Brand, above all needs to know what its reference figure looks like.

Trivially we are led to get closer to a product with a clear and precise history behind it than to an "orphan" product with no other news.

"To do marketing and, in particular, personal branding, it is not enough to say things, you need to have something to say"

Building your own image is to open up mentally, to be creative and genuine. In the end Personal Branding care is also a way to stand out from competitors, to be better, to attract potential customers and not faster to our product or service.

It should always be remembered that "The Personal Brand is the reason why a customer, an employer or a partner chooses us. "

Doing Personal Branding is identifying what your strengths are and working on those with the aim of creating a perfect image and making yourself unique and different from competitors.

Why choose you and not your opponent? Because you definitely have something he doesn't have.

Doing Personal Branding means focusing on yourself, selling yourself first and then your product later.

The Branding strategy is also a Marketing strategy, the goal is the same but with this aspect it is easier to reach and above all complete.

You have to be very careful though, you don't have to "sell yourself" e therefore giving a false image of oneself, making customers perceive something that does not exist. Better to be found and reflect exactly what you are so you avoid nasty surprises.

Be constantly online and actively participate in the immense platform of Social Networks it is a duty for those who want to create an identity for themselves. We are continually judged by the public, by customers, by competitors in our sectors, confronting each other is a common practice.

Nowadays staying transparent is a challenge, the use of social networks makes us fall into the temptation to show what we are not. It's like having the opportunity to create another life but it doesn't have to be, we have to remain ourselves because that's what our clients are looking for, the truth, our real story. Who are we when we leave our office, what are our thoughts, who we aspire to.

As an immediate reflection of Personal Branding there is a automatic increase in interest in our company and the products we sell. Take care of your image to take care of our sales.

Invest in yourself, in who you are and the public will love and be attached to you for a long time.