You’ve seen people with amazing personal brands. They stand out. They’re recognizable and memorable. Their mission is clear and purposeful.
So, you ask yourself: “What’s the secret sauce? How can your brand stand out too?”
Below, we unveil that secret sauce so you can build a brand that gets noticed by the right people for the right reasons and gets you to your goals.
What Is Personal Branding?
We get this question all the time: “What is a brand? And how do I know if I have one?”
Everyone has a brand. We’re each putting out a message and image right now — it may just not be the message and image that will help us achieve our goals. And even if it is, it may not be ‘put together’ and displayed consistently everywhere you market yourself.
Often, people think of a brand as just a few visual elements….
- A logo
- A tagline
- Your photo
- Your bio
However, a personal brand is not any of these things — individually. It’s all of those things combined.
We like to say that personal branding is like a cake. A cake isn’t just flour, sugar, eggs, or icing. It’s all those things combined perfectly with just the right ingredients, at just the right measure, using just the right chemistry, and baked at just the right temperature.
Personal branding, just like cake, is a combination of different elements in just the right amounts. We call that the secret sauce, and we’ve put that into three categories that are easy to understand. Let’s dive in.
Category #1: Be Clear and Purposeful
Your personal brand must answer five critical questions to be clear and purposeful. These five questions are:
- Who do you serve?
- How do you serve them?
- What qualifies you to serve them?
- How does it make their life better?
- What makes you different (from everyone else who is also trying to attract those same people)?
These questions are answered in your brand messaging, such as your elevator pitch, sound bites (our term for ‘highlights of your brand at a glance’), biography, and calls to action.
Category #2: Have a Consistent Brand Image
The look of your personal brand must match the message you’re trying to portray to align with your goals. We call this your brand imagery, and you want it to be consistent throughout.
For instance, if your personal brand is adventurous, then photos of you in a suit and tie do not align with how you want people to view you. Or let’s say you’re trying to attract a very affluent audience. In that case, you want to choose background images that portray the affluent lifestyle your prospects seek. Every detail matters.
Category #3: Be Authentic to You
Your personal brand must be authentic to you for it to stand out and be seen as genuine by your prospects.
That’s because you are different. Your brand can only belong to you because it’s personal branding. And that’s why it’s essential to develop every single ingredient or branding element based on you.
There is one massive mistake many people make regarding this part of the secret sauce. People look at what everyone else is doing and judge their own brand based on someone else’s brand. You don’t want to do that. What someone else has isn’t authentically you, and your customers will know it.
The Takeaway
When you put an image and message out there that doesn’t align with your goals or isn’t unique to you, it looks like this:
- You get very frustrated because you find yourself attracting the wrong prospects and working with people who will likely never buy from you.
- You end up communicating a vague message that sounds like everyone else’s because you haven’t defined what sets you apart from your competition. That means you still haven’t built your value in the eyes of your prospects.
- You waste a lot of marketing dollars because you’re marketing in the wrong place (since you haven’t focused on a specific type of customer) or your message isn’t clearly defined (even if you are marketing in the right place).
These reasons are why we look at 77 different criteria to develop your secret sauce. If your personal brand needs a makeover, we’re here to help. Schedule a free call with us today to help your brand deliver your desired message.
And if you’re a Coach, Consultant, or other Expert with a life-changing message to share, join us inside our free Facebook Group to learn how to position & present yourself and your offers differently in order to maximize your time and dramatically increase profits.
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BrandFace LLC is a personal branding company for coaches, consultants and other experts who want to STAND OUT from their competition and attract their ideal customers so they can become recognized and sought after authorities in their industry. Tonya Eberhart & Michael Carr are international bestselling authors and the partners behind BrandFace. Their mantra is, “People don’t do business with a logo. They do business with a person.”