Having a distinct and defined personal branding message is the first step to building a personal branding framework. It differentiates you from the rest of the consultants and coaches out there. It helps you understand your audience. And it allows you to leave a mark and become known for something.
Your voice and personal branding message are the connective tissue that ties together all the things you talk about. Once you’ve found your voice, you’ll be better able to convey your message. And the less random your message, the more you start to see patterns. Ultimately, this will allow you to fine-tune your content and create a recurring theme.
So how does this entire process of finding your voice work? What are the essential components of your brand personal branding message?
And most importantly, where do you start?
A personal branding message has three important components:
Each plays a crucial role in helping you create a voice that stands out.
POSITIONING YOUR PERSONAL BRANDING MESSAGE
Your position is how your personal branding message fares against others in your niche. It involves finding out why people come to you. What makes you different from the rest of the consultants or coaches in the market?
With regular content creation, you can intentionally reposition your brand within your market. As you’re discovering your voice, you’ll learn what you do and don’t want to talk about.
You can also scope out the competition and see how you can do things differently. What could you do better? What do you know more about?
You can start to map those topics and approaches to help figure out what is most important in your space.
In my case, there are a lot of people who talk about marketing and tactics. The first piece of my positioning in that market is that I take a coaching perspective focusing. I want you to understand how to build a brand that connects with people, that has a reputation, that creates experiences, that creates loyal customers. So that’s my starting point.
BE DISTINCT
And then you go down to the branding coach column and say, OK, what separates me from them? Early on, I identified a few things:
- I have experience working on the biggest brands in the country.
- I’ve spent years working to build my own personal brand.
- I’ve got connections with the top thought leaders in this space.
All of these help differentiate me as a marketing thought leader and help define what I bring to the table in my coaching. A standard consultant probably isn’t sharing their back story and techniques or sharing their thought process.
Your clients, whether they’re starting out or well established, or they have a big budget or a small budget, they need to figure out why you are for them. Your positioning helps them do that.
WRITE YOUR BIOGRAPHY
The second piece of positioning is going through the process of writing out your bio. Actually write out the things you want to talk about and create your conversation points so that when you create content or when you go on interviews or are out speaking — which are great ways to get leads — you have content that aligns with your personal branding message.
Now that you’ve identified the conversations you want to be having on a consistent basis, you’ve got to zero in on what makes that content different from everyone else’s and lean in.
Make it something you highlight and bring out in your conversations.
CREATING A PLATFORM FOR YOUR PERSONAL BRANDING MESSAGE
Now that you’ve got a clear voice and tailored content, you’ve got to create the right platform for that personal branding message.
Picking the platform for your personal branding message
A platform is the place where your content, ideas, thoughts and practices — the things you want to teach people — live and can be categorized and referred to.
This is the piece a lot of people take for granted. The common practice is to just post on social media in places that are popular, and I understand why that happens. It’s a great place to get more eyeballs and more engagement. It’s a great place to generate discovery.
But if you don’t build a way to take those people from these places and bring them into your world, you’re missing a step. You want them to binge your content and read all the different philosophies and all the different thoughts you have. You want to fully pull them into your world.
And without the right platform, you’re missing a place to send people for more of the content you’ve worked so hard for. Is a client interested in your latest podcast? Send them to your website to binge on the rest. Do they love your photos? Turn them on to your Instagram page.
RELATED: Get a refresher on your building your personal branding framework idea in Episode 74: The Personal Branding Framework.
THE DRAWBACKS OF SOCIAL MEDIA
But do it with intention. Social media is great for churning out tons of content, but it gets to be like a library without a catalog. Or going to Amazon with no search feature and literally having to scroll through pages to find what you were looking for.
That’s what’s happening on social media. You want to make sure you’re creating a platform that is searchable, that has places that index your content, and makes the most sense for your content, whether it’s video, visual, written, or audio.
Some of it is self-explanatory: Most people are consuming videos on YouTube. Most people are consuming podcasts on a platform like iTunes. Most people are finding blogs through Google search. So go with the flow in terms of their customer journey, but make sure you’re organized once they get there.
CREATING A DIGITAL RECORD
Another reason your platform is important is that it becomes a resource for you to look back at. Every year as you bring more people into your world, it grows in terms of endurance.
This doesn’t work on every medium. Every time you post something on Facebook, you might gain a follower, but that post will disappear and be buried.
But when a new listener becomes a subscriber, they get pushed new content from your show every week. They can listen, and they can go back, and they can find ways to continue to find other things within your catalog.
So build a platform you can take advantage of and one you’re comfortable with. For me, it’s natural to podcast. Maybe you’re more comfortable writing or filming. It’s no use choosing something that makes you uncomfortable — that probably isn’t your voice.
As you start to build your platform, you can look back at it and ask, based on what I’m building, what are the things that are resonating most? What’s most popular out of my catalog?
Start to highlight those things. You can repurpose those things and you can follow up on those things. You can create series or all sorts of different versions of this topic or idea that’s popular. Then you can refine your personal branding message over time by seeing what works and what doesn’t.
GETTING SOCIAL PROOF
Now, you’ve gone through the trouble of developing your personal brand. You’ve started to find your voice and position yourself in the market. You’ve built a platform.
The thing you need now is to make sure you have is some social proof. This is evidence that you are actually doing something, and it is actually worth your clients’ time.
The platform itself is social proof. That’s useful and helpful. If someone sees that you’ve been doing something consistently over time, it starts to let people know that you are serious, that you can be relied on.
The history developed through your content and this platform is social proof. The guests you bring onto your show or the people you’re interacting with are social proof.
As you go, other pieces of social proof will fall into line:
- Ranking higher
- Reaching more people
- Being more popular with followers
SOCIAL PROOF BY ASSOCIATION
At the beginning of your journey, do not rely on your own content or information to get social proof. It’s better to build an association with other platforms and other people that already have that credibility. You can build your own credibility through that association.
For me, I call it the power of podcasts. I interview top thought leaders in my industry. You see that I’m able to connect with them and we are having the conversation together. That demonstrates credibility.
On top of that, if I wanted to write an article, I could put it on my own blog. But if that article has a guest that is well known, that’s social proof. For a solo article, if I can get it to be posted on a very well known, respected site like Forbes or Entrepreneur, you’re going to trust that I have a little more credibility and that’s social proof for you.
Another great way to build social proof is podcasting, or being a guest on other people’s shows or in other people’s Facebook groups. Basically, you’re finding a way to say, “I have this message, and I’m going to share it in places that already have audiences.”
HAVE YOU FOUND YOUR PERSONAL BRANDING MESSAGE
What do you stand for? What keeps you up at night? How are you going to get that personal branding message out? What are you trying to fix? And how will you make anyone take you seriously?
Once you’ve answered those questions, you’ve officially found your voice. Now, you can start using it for steps two and three of your personal branding network: building your community and making an impact.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael