IO – Having a good, solid personal branding in place is essential, whether you want to build an amazing career or compete in business or a profession. Branding is the basis of your reputation, and it helps build trust, whether professionally or personally.
Personal branding is a brief statement to the public of your goals, objectives, vision and mission. It tells everybody who you are and what you want, what you can do, what you believe in. If you fail to manage your personal branding, your entire life will be adversely affected. If you are perceived as one who is unreliable or untrustworthy, people will consider you to be unimportant. In fact, you might have negatively blocked yourself mentally by branding yourself as “lacking in confidence”, “shy” or “unenthusiastic”. This will tend to impair people’s trust in you as a professional, let alone if you have a business.
This is why Branding You held a “Personal Branding Week” in early December 2021. The week-long program provided applicable solutions to trainees. They learned using Branding You’s systematic program under fun mentoring.
As Indah Warsetio, Personal Branding Coach mentor and Branding You Co-Founder declared in her personal branding webinars, “people buy people” in a digital era. In other words, your key selling point is YOU. You should build a track record that anyone can check out. The keys to personal branding are commitment, confidence, and consistency of performance and benefit to others. This will in turn create a positive self-image.
Here are the basic steps for building solid personal branding:
Find Yourself First – Who Are You?
Identify yourself. Who are you? What do you love and enjoy doing? What skills are you proud of? How do you see yourself being of service and benefit to others? Write it all down first, pen on paper! Express your strengths, your values, your passions on paper first – how you see yourself, what your place in the world is.
Find the Reasons – Why Should People Believe in You?
Show off your competence – those skills you have worked so hard to gain and hone. Create a brief personal profile – your education, skills, training, certifications, experiences. Those things that you can provide to others to serve them, especially your target audience. What makes you better, different, “more” than others? What are your key benefits? List your competitors, professions of others similar to you and show how you are better and more trustworthy than them.
Find Your Authentic Style – What Differentiates You?
One of the things that differentiate you from others is your visual image. How you create your look so others (your audience) can remember you. What you wear shows your personality. How you look affects other
people’s perception of you. Therefore, even when dressing casually, make sure you remain looking clean and professional according to your trade or profession. You are what you wear – it is part of your own personal branding. We all dress up to show respect to others, so dress accordingly.
Establish Your Network – Who Do You Want to Know, and Who Do You Want to Know You? Personal branding works both offline and online. Join a networkn of your profession or business – and establish your branding there. Keep contact with groups like interest groups, alumni groups to know more about your own industry and strengthen your branding as you socialize. Maintain activities there so they know what you think and what you stand for, get to know like-minded people who can be mutually supportive.
Digital Branding – Is It Necessary?
You need to make the client aware of who you are and what you do before they can even consider cooperating with you. Sure you can do this offline, but digital branding will reach a much wider audience and is much more effective to increase awareness of your programs and services. “Awareness” is most important to build when you have a brand, but not many people know you yet. In this case, you should branding yourself more creatively digitally. By using your social media account, create your brand image by using unique content – content that is uniquely yours. This will increase awareness as well as engage emotionally with your followers.
These five steps are the basics that everyone can do. The question is, “How focused are you in establishing yourselves by acting on these basic points consistently? Personal brand is nothing more than a public representation of who you are inside, offline, every day. Establishing and maintaining it means you need to work on yourself every day to establish your reputation. You must train yourself to become optimistic, persistent, and consistent. “Personal branding is about showing your best self to the world. Let’s start with doing good one thing at a time, one day at a time. Start with doing simple things for yourselves, start now,” Indah Warsetio said.