What Is Your Personal Brand?

Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want the world to see you. It is the telling of your story, and how it reflects your conduct, behavior, spoken and unspoken words, and attitudes.

You use your personal branding to differentiate yourself from other people. Done well, you can tie your personal branding in with your business in ways no corporate branding can possibly succeed.

Professionally, your personal brand is the image that people see of you. It can be a combination of how they look at you in real life, how the media portrays you, and the impression that people gain from the information about you available online.

You can either ignore your personal brand, and let it develop organically, possibly chaotically, beyond your control, or you can help massage your personal brand to depict you as the person you want to be.

In the pre-internet days, your personal brand was really just your business card. Unless you were high profile in the media or somebody who featured strongly as the face of advertising, few people would have heard of you. In today’s highly public world, where every little action is discussed at length on social media, you are far less anonymous.

Why Would You Want a Personal Brand?

Your personal brand can be vital to you professionally. It is how you present yourself to current and potential clients. It gives you the opportunity to ensure that people see you in the way you want them to, instead of in some arbitrary, possibly detrimental, way.

It gives you the opportunity to highlight your strengths and your passions. It helps people believe they know you better, and people have much higher trust in those they feel they know; even public people they have never met personally.

This is particularly evident at election time. While many people seek out candidates’ views on issues important to them, other voters have less interest in the process. Instead, they vote for a name they recognize. It comes as no surprise that candidates with strong personal brands succeed in politics, regardless of their political views or beliefs. Regardless of your opinion on Donald Trump as a president, for instance, you can’t deny that he has built a strong personal brand, which helped encourage many people to give their vote to him.

Why is Personal Branding Important?

You need to create a strong personal brand if you want to be considered influential. Your personal brand helps you stand out from everybody else. You can use your personal brand to demonstrate your knowledge and skills about your areas of expertise.

In many ways, your personal brand is what makes you memorable. It is your personal brand that helps you stand out from the thousands of other people like you.