How To Create Your 2022 Personal Brand Visibility Strategy

“This is the year I become known.”

Now is the best time to not only create a personal brand, but to amplify it and become known. With so many channels available to reach your budding audience, becoming more visible is within reach if you’re willing to put in the work.

There is a strategy at play when you decide to step into the spotlight. Here are the things you’ll need to flesh out in order to build your 2022 visibility strategy for your personal brand.

Phase 1: Your Brand

Develop Your One-Liner

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” an often misattributed quote from French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, is one of my favorites. Distilling down a complex idea into something brief, is incredibly difficult.

It’s important that you can distill down what you want to be known for into one simple sentence. It’s not necessarily what you do, or what your company does — it’s what you want to be known for. What will keep you going and what your team will rally around.

Take your time and get really clear on the big vision of what you want to be known for — that’s where your strategy begins.

Developing a personal brand usually revolves around content. That content could run the gamut of producing original songs to teaching Excel. For some it’s writing fantasy books, creating courses or making people laugh. Producing content is how you will gain visibility to your personal brand, it’s why so many business owners write a book.

You don’t have to go down the rabbit hole and start creating content in every way possible, but do get intentional on how 1) you like to create content and 2) how your audience likes to consume content. If you like to create video and you know your audience likes to consume video, win win. If you like to speak on stages, and your audience likes to read a book, you’ll want to revise your approach.

Create Themes

Get clear on a few themes that you can “bucket” your content into. For instance, if you are an interior designer and you want to start developing your personal brand, you might decide to create four content themes: 1) Before and afters 2) DIY tutorials 3) trend spotting and 4) day in the life of your business.

Once you create themes for your content, it’s not only easier for you to create it — but it provides clarity for your brand as well. Your audience will start to anticipate your content, tell others about it and hopefully want to work with you.

Value Driven Content

People who have extremely strong personal brands, think Gary Vaynerchuk or Codie Sanchez, give a ton of valuable content to their audiences. Not only do they provide actionable and thought provoking content, but they have made it super clear what you can expect from them.

A lot of new entrepreneurs who want to create a personal brand start off by talking about themselves, but that is a way for your audience to become disengaged quickly. Focus on providing content that is valuable or teaches them something, and that will create trust and loyalty. There is time to open up about your life and all the quirks in it later.

Phase 2: Execution

Now that you’ve developed what you want to be known for, the theme of your content to supports it and you know how you want to create it — it’s time to execute.

Social

Not every social platform will be appropriate for your content, and that’s totally ok, pick the one that makes the most sense for how you like to create your content and where your audience hangs out. If you are a musician, you might decide YouTube™ is the spot for you. If you are a painter, Instagram might be best.

In the past few years, it’s become much easier to push your content to multiple channels at once giving you even further reach. If you make a short video for TikTok, you can also post on Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels.

Test which channels are giving you the best engagement and then double down on the ones that are performing best.

Press

Press is a great way to get visibility to your brand, no doubt. It’s important to remember though, that getting press is a flash in the pan. So it’s imperative that you are not just relying on press to help amplify your brand visibility. Press can lend credibility to your brand and get you in front of a lot of people who may not have known about you beforehand, but the headlines change daily — so it’s up to you to keep showing up and being… you guessed it: visible.

Develop ways to give any press you receive “legs.” For example, make sure your website is ready for new visitors with a way to capture their information. Share the press piece with your email list and social followers, link to it on your website, etc.

Think of securing press like a relay race. Once you get featured in the press, and the baton is handed to you — you must run with it and finish the race.

Syndication

Syndication of your content is crucial for momentum behind your visibility. Creating a piece of valuable content takes a lot of time and effort — so don’t just post it on your blog. Take snippets and make a video out of it, create a press release for distribution, make graphics to share on social, record a podcast about it, etc., etc., you get the picture.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating something valuable for your audience, share it everywhere far and wide.

Partnerships

Aligning with strategic partners is an excellent way to amplify your visibility. Partnering with other brands to serve a like-minded audience is a great way to lend not only value to one another but credibility to your own brand. Create mutually beneficial ways to work with and partner up with other brands and watch as both brands elevate as a result.

Community Engagement

Once you’ve created a community around your personal brand, don’t forget to nurture it. A lot of content creators want a big personal brand, but lack the bandwidth to really take care of them. This is a very important step in building your legacy.

Take the time to develop systems and processes into your business to engage with, answer and interact with the people who take the time to invest in engaging with you. Someone who does a great job at this is Elyse Myers — see how she amplifies the people in her community who are doing great things.

Don’t just build a community to ignore them — nuture them, and build value for them.

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Stephanie Burns is the founder of The Wyld Agency, an amplification and visibility agency focused on building the legacy and personal brands of company founders. With a background in brand building, media buying, strategy and entrepreneurship, Stephanie has wide experience with an eclectic portfolio of industries. After being a contestant on the Wheel of Fortune, Burns used her winnings to launch her previous company, Chic CEO, an online resource for over 100k female entrepreneurs. With an MBA in Marketing, she’s also a contributor to Forbes Women and Entrepreneur, as well as featured in notable press outlets like Inc., Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, Amex Open, Cosmo, New York Times, among others.