Have you ever curiously looked up about yourself on Google? What came up?
If your answer is nothing, it’s probably because you haven’t put much effort into developing your online personal brand. But what exactly is online personal branding and why is it important?
Jeff Bezos was aptly quoted saying, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Your personal brand helps you in promoting yourself in the online space. It mirrors your work, expertise, or experience that you want people to see about you. Curating a personal brand lets you control the information everyone receives about you on the Internet and their perception of you in real life.
Importance of personal branding and how to benefit from it
In today’s era, social media accounts run in billions. In such a scenario, building a strong personal brand is important to establish trust, reputation, interaction with the audience, and your chances of going up the SERP ladder.
We have never met Oprah, AR Rahman, Bill Gates, or Obama in person, but don’t we have basic knowledge about their personality or expertise? Why? Because they have a PR team in place to curate their personal brand. The information out there helps build a persona to which we react, and they don’t share details that won’t help them grow as a brand.
It’s easy to explain in the case of celebrities; But what does it have to do with us?
Personal branding is important because it determines how two people in the same situation get treated differently.
A perfectly curated personal brand helps you to:
- Stand out in the crowd
By providing you a platform to emphasize and showcase your strengths, area of expertise, experiences, interests, and distinguish yourself from others in the same domain. This enhances your visibility in the online space.
- Generate opportunities
By attracting more clientele, interviews, networks, promotions, and partnerships.
- Increase credibility and inspire trust
Traditional marketing and advertising techniques are now stories of the past. The millennials are more attracted to brands that appear and function like them as opposed to larger corporations. Developing personal branding strategies that provide tailored solutions to your target audience’s concerns can help you inch towards your goal.
- Build connections
By showcasing your uniqueness and specialty in a niche domain, you can build and enhance your visibility and reputations amongst peers.
Top tips to build personal brand in online space
1. Identify your niche
The first mantra for curating a personal brand is introspection. Questions like- what is your passion, why do you want to do it, why one should care about it; can help you determine your niche. By identifying your expertise or X-factor you can define your target audience and build your content and profile around them.
2. Be Consistent
Everything you post on any social media platform creates a reputation for you. Hence, it’s crucial to post consistently across platforms. Imagine a newbie Indie-pop band that has to compete with others who create similar music in abundance. How do they remain competitive? By posting relevant content across all their social media channels, consistently. Also, consistency helps your audience and clients to find you easily.
3. Have a Unified Theme
Apart from content, consistency in brand theme, image, voice, and tone is also crucial for you to remain true to your brand. Having unified logo, profile picture, brand color, and font across your channels or website make your portrayal genuine.
4. Post Original Content
To establish yourself as an expert in any field, it is important to curate your own content. This would make your personal brand relatively authentic. Being a creator would be the easiest way to establish your uniqueness. Diversify your content format and post videos, infographics, and articles to remain connected with your audience.
5. Bring in the Experts
You may also approach firms like AiPlex that has well-trained and experienced teams with processes in place to improve your online reputation. AiPlex performs detailed sentiment analysis, conducts real-time data monitoring, social listening, review, and interaction management to help you develop a clean and consistent online personal brand.
Conclusion
Online personal branding can make or break a reputation. The tips here are to get you started, but it’s up to you to decide how to build your image on the Internet. Reflect on your choices and how it’s going to affect your personal brand.
