Personal branding, some people love it, have mastered the algorithm and built loyal communities, while others are struggling to see the positives, to get the hang of it and aren’t even sure where to start.
A majority of people fall somewhere into the category of knowing what personal branding is and understanding its importance, but not knowing the key to success and growth.
Many things make personal branding effective, but these are the 4 P’s of personal branding success.
Four Ps of Personal Branding:
People
Become aware of your strengths and weaknesses when you are building your personal image, what skills do you have that are strong? And what skills do you hold that can help you shape the image and perception people will have of you? Think of the areas you need to work on as well, what areas do you have that are weaker? Reach out to the people in your network and use online resources to conduct your research, which will help you to gain knowledge to build and work on those weaker areas.
People are one of the most important aspects of personal branding, building a network and a community will help you to build a strong personal brand. Join groups, connect, and network with people. This means you need to create connections with opinion leaders, colleagues, people who work in your industry and people who you look up to.
Be sure to Interact with content on the platform by liking, commenting and resharing content that reflects the personal brand you are building. This can be commenting to start a deeper conversation, agreeing, or disagreeing with content and sharing your thoughts. It is also important to connect with those who interact with your content, reply to their comments, send connection requests, and even message others to build your own community.
Click here to read our blog: Is Personal Branding Worth It?
Presence
Having a strong presence on a platform like LinkedIn is very important, what is it that you want people to see when they come across your personal profile? Is your branding clear? What is your page about? Are you seen as an expert in your field?
Within seconds of visiting your page, people need to feel your presence they should know who you are and what you do. You want to be seen as a strong and trusted leader within your field.
Your presence should also be consistent, don’t post 5 times in a week, engage with posts, and then take 2 weeks off completely. On platforms like LinkedIn having consistent activity is key, if your presence is consistent, they will begin pushing your content to more and more people.
Passion
When you are passionate about what you do, who you are and your beliefs, your personal brand will reflect this. Your professional and personal image that people see should be reflective of someone passionate about what they do and believe in, as they carry it with them in all aspects of life.
People can easily spot who is genuine and who isn’t, so ensure the personal brand you are promoting is truly you in both your personal and professional life. When you are passionate about what you do, your personal branding will come naturally and with ease. You will find yourself sharing a field-specific topic you find extremely interesting or posting about what you did over the weekend that helped you clear your head after a busy working week etc.
If you are passionate about it, it will be easy and will come across as natural and authentic to your audience. You will also achieve far better results than someone who is putting in half the effort and doesn’t truly care.
Persistence
Building a personal brand isn’t an easy feat, it doesn’t happen without struggle and won’t happen overnight. It’s important to set a goal and stick to it, keep on persevering with consistent branding steps, from posting, commenting, sharing, and networking.
There will be posts with little to no engagement, but this won't last forever, the more consistently you are posting and the more you are engaging with others and building a community the more engagement you will be getting back.
Persist on, stick to your goal, and don’t let obstructions and setbacks get in your way.