10 Important Tips for Entrepreneurs to Improve Personal Branding

From hiring a professional to meeting new people for business, personal branding has become a necessity for entrepreneurs to stand out of the crowd and achieve more.

Being an entrepreneur, it becomes important to invest time and effort in building a personal brand. However, if you don’t do so, competitors will take advantage and increase their brand value, which may hurt an entrepreneur’s image.

Building a personal brand requires research but if you bank upon the information available on the internet, it’s quite likely to get misguided or implement the wrong strategy to build a personal brand.

To help entrepreneurs take advantage of personal branding and enhance their brand’s value on the internet, following is a list of personal branding tips, which only a brand management company can tell you.

Specifying Goals

By being unaware of the long term goals, an entrepreneur may lose focus and not do the task at hand properly thereby wasting significant amount of time in the process. Personal branding goals can be about increasing the number of followers on social media, getting an article published in a business magazine and more. To achieve such goals, one must be aware of them and break those into small parts to work towards the accomplishment.

Showing Originality

A personal brand is about showing uniqueness and originality. People like those brands that stand out of the crowd and offer something different than what is already available to them. Before starting out, entrepreneurs should know their target market as personal branding strategy depends a lot on the type of industry and the type of target users.

Social Media

Social media offers different platforms for targeting different groups of people. LinkedIn helps one to increase the reach of his professional network, Twitter comes handy to get in touch with influencers, industry leaders, and more, Facebook is important to stay connected with friends and family.

Also, there are many social media platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and more, which can be used to grow a personal brand. To harness the full power of social media, an entrepreneur should keep exploring different platforms to find the perfect growth hacking strategy for social media.

Content Strategy

Applying a content strategy can do wonders for an entrepreneur who wishes to promote himself as a personal brand. However, before finalizing a content strategy, an entrepreneur must answer questions like:

• How does he want others to perceive him as a person and as a professional?
• How much difference is there between him and the person he wants to be?

Content marketing and personal branding go hand in hand, which can help an entrepreneur establish himself as a recognized expert. By building an effective content strategy, one can easily target the relevant audience as well.

Also Read: Various Metrics to Measure Content Marketing Success

Online Networking

Online networking plays an important role in building a personal brand by helping an entrepreneur increase the reach of his network. One can implement a strategy, which enables an entrepreneur to communicate with other people in the same industry. However, to implement such strategies, it is essential to have knowledge about the basics of blogging, keyword research, search engine optimization, and more.

Offline Networking

These days most conversations take place online. Seeing such a trend, most entrepreneurs have shifted their strategies to digital-only and have completely ignored the benefits of offline networking.

However, by increasing the online presence through online networking, one cannot simply assume that the objective of reaching a wider audience is accomplished.

No matter how much effort goes into networking with people online, offline networking holds equal importance. Offline networking should be included as a part of improving personal branding that includes the following:

• Attending professional events
• Public speaking at conferences, and more

Offer Freebies

Offering freebies is an important tactic for improving a personal brand, which is derived from growth hacking. It helps an entrepreneur gain more followers and increase his professional network in the process. In addition to this, by offering freebies, more leads can be generated that can help an entrepreneur accomplish business goals. Common examples of freebies include the following:

• eBooks
• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Online Seminars
• Subscription, discounts and more

Motivation

Knowing the motivation behind personal branding is essential as it will help an entrepreneur implement effective strategies for achieving goals. For an entrepreneur, there can be various kind of motivations behind building a personal brand, such as:

• Increase professional network
• Showcase industry expertise
• Gather more followers on social media, and more

Building Relationships

People tend to do business with those, who they trust and have heard about from genuine sources. This is where the role of influencers with regard to their relation with millions of followers come into play. Starting out as an entrepreneur can be difficult, but influencers can bring a difference to initial publicity. Entrepreneurs should embrace the power of influencer marketing by building healthy and professional relationships with them.

Also Read: 9 Growth Hacking Tips & Tools For Startups & Ecommerce Businesses

Be Consistent

Earning people’s trust and changing their perception about a brand is a challenge for every entrepreneur. If a brand is not consistent with its marketing efforts, then it may suffer greatly and eventually suffer financial loss as well. People prefer those brands that are consistent in their effort. With the continuous usage of social media strategy and content marketing strategy, brands can achieve a higher level of consistency that can greatly improve the branding efforts.

Do you have your own favorite tips on personal branding? Share them with us by leaving a comment below.