Personal Branding: some guidelines to follow

Personal branding is a very important topic nowadays. When we talk about Personal Branding, we tend to indicate the set of techniques and strategies to be used to advertise your image, your past experiences and skills, your training and work experience as a real brand. Doing personal branding means knowing how to communicate in the best possible way, taking advantage of your distinctive points to stand out from the crowd. It is important to create an interesting image that is able to attract the target audience, and this is also done by telling your story. It is essential to create an original image and a solid reputation that lasts over time and a level of authority and credibility within your professional network.

Below, we will talk about how to do personal branding, and all the strategies to promote yourself, paying particular attention to the importance of having a well-finished LinkedIn profile, which is also in line with your image.

How to build your own personal branding

At the beginning, when you start working on your personal branding, you have to spend a lot of time to be able to make yourself known and appreciated. Participation in offline and online industry events proves vital for this purpose, being the easiest way to get out of the boundaries of your business, to make people talk about themselves and their skills in a positive way.  

To build winning personal branding strategies it is advisable to structure and plan every action that is part of what you want to communicate. It is therefore necessary to build a self-marketing plan, outlining what will be the content to be published and choosing the right channels through which to publish it.

During this process, it is important to focus on:

• Objectives – To build an effective personal branding strategy, in line with what you want to communicate, it is essential to set your own goals. To achieve these goals, it will be important to focus on your own strengths, highlighting what makes you unique and different from other individuals, indicating the benefits you could bring to your target.
• The target – it is essential to define your target audience. It is necessary to establish who makes up the audience to which we speak, to which slice of the market it corresponds, analyzing its distinctive features, and therefore understanding what are the interests, problems and needs that characterize the target in question. The goal, at this stage, is to identify yourself as the best solution to turn to to solve a problem.
• Channels – You need to define the right social channels to rely on. Every channel differs greatly in terms of performance for both content and audience. For this reason, it is first necessary to establish your target audience and then structure the content intended for it, choosing the best online channels.

LinkedIn, the best channel for personal branding

For the purposes of your online positioning, one of the channels to use is LinkedIn, the most famous social network in the business field, very useful for building and consolidating relationships with other users through the publication of valuable content. You can expand your network of contacts according to your interests, also connecting with professionals in your sector. Making personal branding on LinkedIn means gaining the trust and interest of those who belong to your network of contacts, thus becoming a point of reference. LinkedIn rewards useful contents, thus allowing you to reach as many people as possible.

But how can you create an effective personal branding and storytelling strategy on LinkedIn?

First, it is important to plan a strategy that starts from the identification of your target. Next, you need to focus on other factors, such as profile optimization, networking, posting content, and interacting with your audience. You need to create interesting content for your entire audience to attract them to your network. To be successful, you need to have the courage to experiment with different strategies. Finally, through storytelling, you end up creating empathy with your audience. And you could also make live videos with other professionals or other entrepreneurs in the same sector, do interviews with opinion leaders or collect the opinions of those who are passionate about your story. Making strategic partnerships and engaging people with a wider audience than yours, but always targeted, can be a good way to expand your fan base.

But how can you monitor the effectiveness of your Personal Branding on Linkedin?

Easy! In this regard, you can use a tool made available for LinkedIn called "Your Social Selling Index". This KPI consists of 4 components:

• Establish your professional brand 
• Find the right people 
• Interact with insights
• Build relationships 

The Social Selling Index gives you a score that, monitored over time, makes you understand if and how you are improving your personal branding on LinkedIn, that is, if your strategy works. At this link, you can calculate your SSI.  

How to write a perfect profile on LinkedIn

Here you are some tips to boost your personal branding in LinkedIn and stand out from competitors by building a profile focused on impact and competences. Let’s see them in detail.

Impact

Focus on Impact. Find out here some general guidelines on how to create an impactful profile by using:

• Well-structured profile with bullet points, Strong actions, Tangible outcomes, and right content
• Well-structured and complete section for Experience and Education

Well-structured profile with bullet points, strong actions, tangible outcomes, and right content

A summary profile should include short, concise, and targeted statements to summarize your skills and experiences. Each bullet point should be focused on what actions you performed and what was the outcome of those actions. Your profile needs to express the significance of your work. Begin each bullet point with strong action verbs that inform on the actions you performed and the outcomes you achieved. Quantify and qualify the impact of actions. Outline tangible outcome or size and scope of work, such as revenue, cost, size of your team, certifications or position you held. Demonstrate all qualities related to your personality encompassing academic achievements as well as extra-curricular activities into defined sections that outline these aspects, highlighting actions and achievements corresponding to each section.

Well-structured and complete section for Experience and Education

State your tasks and accomplishments including name of the organization and position of responsibility held. Mention degree, graduation date, major, minor, and GPA Listing academic honours and awards is optional.

Competencies

Highlight your competences. These elements include:

• Analytical
• Communication
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Initiative

Analytical

Analytical skills include the process of analysing a problem, getting to the root cause, structuring problems, and identifying solutions. They are a “must have” for any job role, as every job is essentially solving some issues / challenges that an organization is facing. While these skills can be exhibited in various ways, it is important that you showcase how you have solved problems in the past.

The most common analytical skills are: 

• Practical thinking
• Critical thinking
• Detail oriented
• Structured problem solving
• Comparative analysis
• Strategy execution
• Process improvement
• Situational analysis
• Market entry

Communication

These skills are the ability to articulate your messages effectively to get to a desired outcome. This is the most transferrable and critical skill that successful employees use in their careers because it is linked to the ability to influence others to get to a desired goal.

The most common communication skills are: 

• Interpersonal skills
• Collaboration
• Written communication
• Presentation skills
• Advising Board
• Forming alliances
• Negotiation
• Relationship management
• Client management

Leadership

Leadership skills refer to the ability to take on a role of Leading teams, projects, or any scope of work and bring it to excellence. In some cases, even if the current role does not require strong leadership skills, it is important to show it as a critical skill as it clearly predicts long term success.

The most common leadership skills are: 

• Management skills 
• Coordinating activities
• Team leadership
• Entrepreneurial skills
• Deal management
• Process Improvements
• Organizational restructuring
• Project management
• Strategy execution

Teamwork

This skill is the ability of a professional to work with others in a cohesive manner towards a common goal. Being a team player is fundamental because the success of an organisation is never the result of only individual efforts, rather the result of how individuals come together to strive for a common goal. Team skills are critical in any role and define the success of any project.

The most common teamwork skills are: 

• Team management
• Building relationship
• Team leadership
• Facilitation
• Team collaboration
• Supervising teams
• Staff supervising
• Team building
• Team training

Initiative

Initiative skills can be shown through creative problem solving, innovation, or simply going beyond the call of duty. Initiative is the skill that differentiates the average performers from the high performers. In other words, those people who step out of their comfort zones to achieve an outcome.

The most common initiative skills are: 

• Innovation
• Idea generation
• Mentoring
• Entrepreneurial skills
• Growth planning
• Innovation strategy
• New markets
• Segmentation
• Cost reduction

Conclusions

Building the set of strategies aimed at improving the positioning is a long process that requires constancy and time.

Developing your own personal branding helps to advertise your business and, for this reason, it is especially important to follow the guidelines for creating winning strategies.

To create engagement with your fans, you need to share attractive content, high-resolution videos, and unique material to make a difference. Taking advantage of Digital PR, LinkedIn, Instagram, having a personal blog and being constant in the publishing phase allow entrepreneurs or professionals to build and consolidate relationships.

A great job of personal branding helps to be actively searched. By telling their story and expressing their ideas, professionals or entrepreneurs do nothing but create an empathetic relationship with others. Good luck!