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What is personal branding?

To define and implement your personal brand strategy, you first need to understand what it is exactly. Essentially, personal branding is how you present yourself to others.
Mirelle Hassler
Last Updated
October 22, 2021

To define and implement your personal brand strategy, you first need to understand what it is exactly. Essentially, personal branding is how you present yourself to others. The idea is to promote certain aspects of your life, which are a combination of skills, experience and personality. You are entirely in charge of what you want people to see and which aspects you promote. Personal branding is a form of marketing where you can create a certain association with your name towards other people.

The main goal of working on a personal branding strategy is to grow your business, but it doesn’t have to be exclusively business-related. You can, for example, aspire to educate people on a specific topic that you're knowledgeable about.

Social media has become an easy way to develop and promote your personal brand, as it is accessible to millions of people. Creating a strategy for personal branding is great for coaches, CEOs, business owners, someone who wants to influence people, or anyone really.  Keep in mind that each and every person on social media has a personal brand, some are better at it than others. You can see it as a chance to set yourself apart from the competition by highlighting your strong points.

Know that not working on your personal brand is also communicating. But not what you want to...

Great examples of people who managed to create a strong personal brand are Richard Branson (Virgin), Rich Lesser (Boston Consulting Group), Sara Blakely (SPANX) or Ilham Kadri (Solvay).

These are all very known and influential people, but there’s a lot of people with a smaller following that have also managed to build a strong personal brand. You don't need to be world famous to build out a personal brand.

Over time, the effort you have put into personal branding will position you as a leader in your field of expertise. Imagine people discussing certain topics and referring to you because you have a lot of knowledge and expertise in that field. A great example of this is Neil Patel: he’s a great reference when you want to learn more about SEO, digital marketing and growing businesses online.

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