What is Personal Brand?
Personal branding or brand ing refers to the set of strategies put in place to promote oneself, one's skills and experience, and one's career as if it were a brand.
Exploited in any industry, it has much to do with personal marketing.
In 1997, Tom Peters, American marketing guru and CEO of FastCompany, published an article titled The Brand Called You, arguing, "My reputation and credibility depend on how effectively I can communicate my expertise and distinguish myself from others, thus determining the quality of my future work."
Therefore, in order to implement any marketing strategy, to gain authority and build a reputation, it is important to be aware of oneself and one's identity.
But above all, it is crucial to understand what we communicate about ourselves to others.
The three pillars of Personal Branding:
The keywords you must, therefore, always keep in mind are expertise, authority and network.
You need to be identified as a competent person in a particular area, and you need to be able to communicate this to others effectively and with valuable content.
You need to come across as authoritative in your field, that way people will trust you even if they cannot decree your actual competence.
As for networking, you need to create a network of professionals like yourself with whom you can collaborate and grow together and consequently a network of people who follow you for your valuable content made available.
What to consider for personal branding?
In a market where everything seems to look alike, the elements we need to work on to give evidence of our uniqueness are these:
- What do we know how to do?
- How do we know how to do it?
- Why do we differ from our competitors?
- What benefits do we offer to our network?
- Why is our price the right one?
After understanding exactly who we are, the next step is to answer these questions. But that's not enough; after outlining our distinctive features, it is important to communicate them in a way that our audience understands theiroriginality, uniqueness, and consistency.
To build an empathetic brand, it is essential to share one's resources and establish a constructive dialogue with others.
Possessing a good reputation and being able to explain properly what you are offering will allow for more benefits in terms of return for whatever the goal is set.
People tend to think that the utility of nurturing these elements is only for those profiles who want to advance in their careers or change jobs, but this is not the case: we all prefer to have relationships at work with those who have a strong reputation and communicate reliability.
Why do personal branding?
There is never a second chance to make a good first impression: personal branding is not self-promotion, it is not what we communicate about ourselves, but it is much more related to what others say about us when we leave the room.
Whatever work you do, it is important how you show yourself to the world and on social networks. Anyone who wishes to inquire about you will almost immediately go looking for you on the web.
So it is crucial to give a correct image, a message about who you are and what you want to tell the world.
A 2018 survey by the Association of Human Resource Directors AIDP shows that 71 percent of Italian companies searched the Internet for information on potential candidates and not only using Linkedin (92 percent), but also Facebook (34 percent), Twitter (18 percent), YouTube(2 percent).
Respondents gave a simple answer of why they no longer limit themselves to the resume: "through the network it is possible to understand the context in which the candidate moves and whether the lifestyle is consistent with the corporate image."
Who can use personal branding?
Personal Branding can help many categories of people.
A recent college graduate just out of university, for example, can communicate and sell his skills and knowledge in the business world and get interesting hooks.
Even the manager of a company who wants to launch his business on the Internet is doing Personal Branding, the moment he decides to put himself out there and sell himself at his best on new platforms.
Most freelancers who have started from scratch need to do Personal Branding to position themselves and get the word out about themselves and their services.
Even freelancers who have been hanging out in the business world for years are making use of Personal Branding to keep themselves active and not be forgotten, continuing to promote themselves and their business and expanding their network of contacts and clients to become more and more successful.
In essence, Personal Branding is within the reach of every person-or company/corporation-who has some interesting service to offer.
How to Stand Out.
The problem with Personal Branding is that so many other people are selling themselves as professionals in their field these days.
There are bound to be hundreds of other people like you, with the same skills as you, who are trying to sell themselves online.
So what? How do you do it?
You have to stand out!
Being original is one of the first challenges you face when you decide to sell your Brand.
It's not just the Brand that has to be original, the way you convey a message also has to make an impression.
William Arruda, an American personal branding expert, says that true wealth, in a world where everything looks a bit alike, is singularity.
Personal branding is not personal promotion, it is not communicating an image that does not match the reality of ourselves, but the need to be authentic to create a strong and empathetic personal brand.
There are thousands of brands in the world, but your personality, the way you build relationships with your network, your defining elements are unique.
In short, personal branding is a very important tool that allows you to enhance your skills.It allows you to attract new work and grow professionally or create one from scratch by building your digital identity.
Federica Berandi
Content Creator Trainee | Digital Innovation Days