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Have you ever Googled yourself? What shows up? The results you see are the first impression people will have of you. Are they good enough? Is the knowledge you share about yourself across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms relevant and eye-catching?
Being an aspiring influencer, it is necessary that you pay special attention to your personal branding. The concept of “personal branding” is similar to branding a company – your purpose should be building your reputation in the industry.
Personal branding is known by various names such as Individual branding, self-promotion, etc. However, all these terms mean the same thing. Indeed, personal branding is the process of building a solid reputation among the target audience. This process involves managing your interactions with clients and fans and creating a meaningful impact through quality content. Being an influencer, you must try to stand out in your respective area.
This blog post is for all the ambitious online influencers who are struggling to build strong personal branding. The post will reveal some secret techniques that will help you with individual branding. But before that, let’s have a glance at why influencers need to create personal branding more than anything.
Why Personal Branding Is Important for Influencers
Not only an effective personal branding differentiates you from the competition, but it also helps you build trust with prospective clients. Since you never get a second chance to make a first impression, you should make it one that will build trust and reflect who you are. However, you will have to promote yourself as an expert in your particular niche who has an impact on people’s choices and opinions. Below are some key benefits of having a strong personal branding.
It Helps You Make Connections
Personal branding helps you build a reliable connection in your area of specialty. There is no limit to personal branding. It can go beyond the digital world. Once you have made connections within your target industry, you get more exposure like speaking events. Opportunities like this help you get more leads and connections for absolutely free. The importance of branding is not just limited to making a connection, but also it aids in building customer loyalty. When you connect with your audience on an emotional level, you better transfer your messages and values to your audience.
Fashion and fitness influencer Emily Davies builds connections on Instagram by responding to her followers’ comments.
Build Credibility
Personal branding helps you to establish your name as an expert and thought leader in your area of specialty. Therefore, you gain more recognition. Besides this, personal branding enables you to create a lasting impression and a self-reward for the individuality itself. Since, 92% of people believe in recommendations from individuals over companies, building credibility as an influencer can get you a lot of benefits.
Get to Know Yourself First
If you’re wondering how to get started with personal branding, let us tell you that your very first step to self-branding should be knowing yourself. You may start it by doing a little-audit exercise.
Think over your strengths, passions, and values to find out who you really are. Ponder on your experiences, expertise, and leadership vision to get a clear idea of what you want to do. These small things will make it much easier for you to market yourself as you’re coming from a place of authenticity and purpose.
Know Your Audience
You must know your audience entirely. Learn as much as you can about them. This may include standard data on what profession they are in, how much they earn, what’s their likes and dislikes, where they live, etc. If possible, try to know about their beliefs, dreams, and challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.
Interact with your audience. Study them by reading what they’re saying on relevant forums, social media accounts, and other platforms. Don’t make an effort to appeal to everyone; rather you should identify your core audience. Find out which audience segments have the potential to become long-term customers.
YouTube formerly known as Tana Mongeau likes and responds to her fans’ comments on her YouTube videos.
Create a Strong Online Portfolio
For online influencers, the significance of presenting a unique, cohesive digital portfolio has enhanced significantly and will continue to do so. Portfolios are no longer simply a representation of an individuals’ personal brand but they play an essential role in consumers’ decision-making process.
Create an attractive online portfolio depending on your industry. The good news is, you don’t need to have technical skills to create a portfolio website nowadays– thanks to online website builders. With the help of a website builder that usually supports drag-and-drop functionality, you can create a professional-looking portfolio website within a few minutes. Remember, your portfolio is the virtual business card that people will go through to learn everything about you. So, always choose a reliable platform or tool to create a portfolio.
You may also set up an informative blog to share content your audience might be interested in. Once you have created content, it is time to optimize it for search engines so that you can receive organic search results. Learn some search engine optimization techniques to get a good ranking in search engine results.
Couple and travel influencers Jack Morris and Lauren Bullen have a strong online portfolio where they upload content daily.
Build Your Foundation in the Right Places
Once you know who you are and what your audience is, it is time to build a solid foundation. Being an aspiring influencer, you must have a strong yet unique online presence so that people can quickly identify or find you.
When it comes to social channels, be selective at first. It is advisable to choose only one or two platforms. Get to know where your target audience spends the most time. For instance, if you write a parenting blog for new moms, maybe you find the moms you want to reach, do not use Twitter. The point is, avoid wasting your time maintaining a social presence on a platform that will not help you start conversations with the audience you want to reach.
Create a Unique Logo
As an influencer, it should be your priority to have a unique and memorable logo for all your social accounts, portfolio website, and blog. Your logo is a symbol that is associated with your brand identity.
Don’t forget an ideal logo compliments your personal branding and helps you build an emotional connection with your target audience. One of the crucial things to consider when designing a logo is the places where you’re going to use it. Although it will be used in various sizes, formats, and colors on different promotional materials, you should make sure it is flexible and looks simple.
There are plenty of online tools available that let you create a professional-looking logo within a few minutes.
Take a look at YouTuber and Team 10 founder Jake Paul’s logo for example.
Use Unique, Images and Graphics and Icons
If you want to stand out as an influencer, you must avoid using free stock media files on your social media accounts. Since images and other visual content going to be an important part of your branding and market strategies, make sure they are unique and creative. AI-powered image extenders, image restoration tools, and image editing tools can serve as lifesavers if you find yourself lacking in unique images.
Images are used on various platforms that might have their particular requirements. However, if you want to make your branding recognizable on all of the platforms, define the style of imagery and keep it consistent across all platforms.
Note: The style will depend on your brand message personality and the type of content you share.
Notice Jeffree Star’s use of custom thumbnails for his YouTube channel. The thumbnails are edited and photoshopped in a cohesive manner. They each feature Jeffree and makeup products specific to each video.
Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
To attract the right audience, you should be optimizing all your social media profiles. Some tips for optimizing your social profiles include:
- Use a high-quality profile picture on all your social accounts.
- Write a clear profile description. Also, add the keywords and phrases related to what you do.
- Add your location and contact details.
- Eliminate all the information and post you find can compromise your personal branding.
Check out Instagram influencer Chelsea Kauai’s optimized Instagram profile.
Try Profile Video
It is no brainer anymore that video content has the potential to take your personal branding to the next level. According to video marketing statistics, more than 82% of Twitter users watch video content. Around 45% of people spend more than an hour on Facebook and YouTube videos a week. Consequently, as an influencer, creating video content for your profile is a must.
Create a unique profile video to draw the eyeballs of your investors and customers. Usually, a profile video is a short video giving an overview of your personal brand. This two or three-minute video introduces who you are, what you do, the audience you are targeting, and how you can add value to their organization.
There are plenty of platforms where you can upload your videos such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Vimeo. Also, utilize social media accounts to spread your profile video across the world.
Note celebrity YouTuber Jack Black’s short and simple profile video.
Leverage YouTube’s Strength
YouTube is one of the most significant platforms that helps you achieve great success. PewDiePie, HolaSoyGerman, etc. are a few examples of YouTube celebrities who have a huge fan following. We have observed various people come from nothing and achieve immense fame by merely uploading a video to YouTube.
Some steps on how to get started on YouTube include:
- Recognize your talent, niche, or topic.
- Upload your video with a proper title and description.
- Share your videos on your social media profiles such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.
Bonus Tip: For a more comprehensive look at how to get started on YouTube check out our blog post!
Target Small but Specific Goals
Think outside the box to keep your followers engaged and stay active on all your social accounts. Keep an eye on the number of likes, comments, and shares you have on social accounts.
Evaluate your progress from time-to-time. Do you notice a lift in new followers when you post a specific type of content? Find out if your content results in engagement. Always try to work on creating quality content.
Discover what kind of content is going viral on the internet. Try to understand the mechanism working behind its success. Work on reverse engineering, if possible. For instance, memes are getting a good response on social media right now so they might work to engage your audience. However, make sure the humor is relevant to your niche.
Invest some time and research to get an idea of what is working successfully and what’s not.
Captivate Your Audience
As an online influencer, you must make sure that you are leaving a long-lasting impact on the minds of your fans. Post high-quality content on your social media platforms. You must ensure that the material is engaging.
Take the help of online tools to create professional and engaging content. Also, create a perfect visual strategy. Your ultimate goal should be boosting your engagement rate, visibility, and your fan count. As your business grows, you might be able to hire a team of experts to support your editing and photography services. In the meantime, you may use affordable tools like Renderforest to create engaging content such as images, logos, videos, and portfolio to your target audience.
Travel influencer The Blonde Abroad captivates her audience through her perfectly curated Instagram feed.
Build Relationship with Existing Influencer
Take the time to build a relationship with other influencers. It will help you in plenty of ways. Engage with their posts and share their content on your social accounts. One thing that every influencer wants is credibility. By giving them free access to your followers is the easiest way to start building a relationship. Letting influencers know you’re paying attention to them and their content is one great way to build up relationships.
Final Words
Personal branding has turned into an essential step to building your reputation in your specific industry based on your goals. Not only it helps you raise self-awareness, build credibility, and grow your network but it also supports you beat the competition and get new opportunities.
Whether you are a popular influencer already or just starting out, personal branding is something that you can’t stop working on. Luckily, nowadays, you don’t need to break your bank to work on your branding – thanks to tools like Renderforest. It lets you create a logo, video, and website under the same roof.
Remember, branding takes a lot of time and effort. So when you start your journey, have patience, and work on the above-mentioned tips and tricks. We hope they will be helpful to you.
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Author’s Bio: Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest, a Content Marketing Specialist and an expert in SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Link Building who enjoys sharing the experiences gained along working as a marketer and helping other entrepreneurs succeed.
