What is a personal brand? 

A brand. This term used to be associated only with trademarks. In today's world of everyday digitization and significant growth of social media, each of us has our own personal brand. 

There are many definitions of personal branding. A brand is definitely more than just an image and marketing activity. A brand is all of you. We are our own brands - whether we build them consciously or not. A personal brand is also the image of others about us and that has a huge impact on our professional and private relationships.

Personal branding, i.e. building a personal brand, is all activities aimed at marking ourselves, our own person or the name of everything we do and say in reality and in social media. In this way we become a kind of product - recognizable and differentiated by the market. Building a personal brand is a well-planned and well-thought-out process of managing your professional image and career as well as your personal life.

What benefits does personal branding give you?

Personal branding activities bring many benefits both on a professional and probably private level. Through the social trust built up to personal brand it is easier to network and establish business relations. A well-built personal brand is a strong social proof, giving you credibility in the eyes of others. Having a developed brand often involves building the image of an expert in a given branch. This equates to trust in the context of correct statements. Another issue is to strengthen the image perception in the eyes of a potential employer, employee or business partner. It is worth adding that a developed and professional personal brand increases confidence and freedom of professional expression.

Who is a personal brand for?

A more difficult question would be the question for whom a personal brand is not for. Whether you want it or not, everyone builds their own personal brand. In such a case, it would be much better to consciously and thoughtfully build a strategy of action towards positive personal brand building. To put it simply, it can be said that personal branding is for all those for whom the image is inseparably connected with the income. 

How to build personal branding?

You already know that personal branding activities are a long-term process. In fact, it means that you will not build a strong brand overnight and you will have to wait for potential results. Each process consists of stages which should be strategically planned. 

The first one is the stage of self-analysis of your staff. You first need to know yourself what you are best at in order to be able to communicate this to the world. So it is worth to start by creating a personal SWOT analysis. You need to identify your own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You will find many simple sheets to do this analysis in the Internet. The self-analysis with the SWOT methodology also allows you to identify your personal value and the most important competences that will form a solid point of the following future activities. 

The next stage of building a personal brand is to determine the areas of activity and target groups you want to reach through personal brand activities. It is about choosing your expert specialization and then analysing the group of brand recipients (after all, you do not want to direct your services to everyone). So at this stage it is also worth to create a person, i.e. your ideal customer profiles.

The next stage is defining your personal brand goals. Why do you want to build your brand? A good methodology is the 5 why theory or Simon Sinek's approach to looking for motivation and reasons of activities. What do you want to achieve with it? Be sure to answer these questions properly.

The final step is to pack the brand in visual and text content consistent with the values. The visual side of the brand may seem to be an insignificant element at the beginning of the brand building process, but it should be remembered that the first thing we see in contact with a personal brand is the man - his appearance and behavior and the appearance of everything that represents the brand, the whole so-called visual identity. Visual identification of a brand is everything that illustrates it - a logo, a slogan, all advertising materials and graphics that are published in all media, a website, branding in social media, etc.

The last stage of building a personal brand is the issue of action, presentation and gaining further reach. There are many tools and channels to communicate the brand to the audience. You have to approach the plan of creating a personal brand with your head, think about what financial, personal and time resources you have in order not to choose too many channels, because then the communication will blur and will not bring the expected results, because the recipients should be reached on a regular basis and boring content should not be directed to them. Remember that a small number of users in social media actively publishes content (for example, analysing Polish users of Linkedin only 2% of them actively publish content), so it is not relatively difficult to break through! Just do the work!