7 Important Lessons on Standing Out From The Crowd
Whether you’re an established professional or just budding in your career. It can be a struggle to reach success. By building a personal brand you can make powerful use of your time in reaching your goals and create lasting impressions on customers and peers.
In Building Brand [You], Cyndee Woolley, APR, shares seven vital lessons to creating a personal brand. Fostering personal and professional relationships can help you remain relevant within your career and help you set goals that align with your personal values to help your business flourish.
1. You are Brand [You]
The first step to creating a prosperous personal brand is to focus the sights on yourself. A personal brand doesn’t live up to anyone else’s expectations from you, instead it sets the direction of your own life.
Accepting yourself and your faults is the first step to establishing authentic goals, values and priorities that you will be able to completely commit to.
2. Set your sights and goals for [You]topia
Genuine goals, values and priorities in place set a firm foundation for a personal brand as an extension of yourself. The ideal [You]topia is unique to you and your aspirations and what you want to achieve.
As much as these goals and aspirations should be daring and full of passion, they have to be simple enough to retain purpose in our everyday lives.
3. Value Brand [You], or no one else will
Building long-term success comes with assessing your skills and accomplishments to understand your value. If you allow yourself to undercut your own skills, others will undercut your value.
To build the worth of your own brand, know who your customer is and why they value your business, use the right tools you need to provide the best customer service, and narrow your focus on delivering the value your customers desire.
4. Build your network wisely
Professional networking can be fulfilling in theory, but oftentimes does not feed personal values and goals. Your valuable time can be wasted in attempting to connect with groups of people who are not ready to make investments in your business.
To foster your personal brand, you need to cut through clutter and develop a solid customer base to remain profitable. Managing and decluttering your connections can result in being able to evaluate what relationships are valuable enough to pursue.
Managing your relationships and networking time is easy when you segment your contacts and cut the clutter. By breaking up contacts into groups including ideal customers, network of peers and inspirational relationships, it is simple to focus time and efforts. Grouping relationships will help you evaluate if and when a relationship is worth pursuing.
5. Personal brands must remain simple, short and strong
It is important to be prepared for any situation when you make an appearance. In communicating your brand’s relevance to others, you must show your value. This confidence starts with appearance and body language, organizing key messages and relevant stories, focusing on your audience and leaving others feeling inspired.
If you are able to leave others with a strong and compelling impression, they will be left wondering “How do I get to know you?” upon first impression, keeping them wanting to investigate yourself and your business.
6. Smart brands speak up
Confidence in the value of your personal brand begins when you choose to share your personal and professional identity. By sharing who you are, you can create memorable connections that will establish strong relationships.
Effectively expressing your brand can be done by communicating five key messages that are easily understood and highly influential. These key messages are:
- Knowing you are the influencer because you can envision your goals
- Establishing credibility with top accomplishments
- Expressing relevance through knowledge of benefits
- Sharing your brand value
- Asking yourself “What action would you like people to take?”
These key messages are balanced in what you need to express and what a recipient needs to know. When others see and fully understand your brand value, they can constantly refer the kinds of connections and customers to drive your growth and help reach your goals. By communicating in ways that are concise and compelling, your audience will be able to value your brand as you do.
7. Be relevant or be replaceable
Staying relevant in an ever-changing world means you have to constantly evolve and grow your personal brand. Core values and goals act as a strong foundation and must allow room for growth.
Honest and constructive feedback can help you adjust to how you express your brand and run your business. Evolving your personal brand allows you to remain relevant within your profession and in your life.
Finding the benefits in your brand
Building a personal rand will set the direction in your professional and personal life. Meaningful goals and priorities allow you to express yourself in an authentic way.
With Brand [You], you can take control of your life and focus on what is important to you, such as advancing your career, enhancing your education or spending more time for personal and family ventures.
