Today, building a personal brand has never been more important. As the world continually taps into the gig economy, more entrepreneurs and employees are looking to promote their individual skills alongside the collective efforts of their companies.
According to a study released by Upwork, the freelance workforce in the US is growing three times faster than traditional employment. Furthermore, by 2027, freelancers are expected to become a dominant force in the US workforce.
Building a personal brand can help individuals to highlight key metrics to prospective employers, including verified qualifications, creativity, and the promotion of a professional, well-rounded image.
Although many more of us are seeking to undergo an entrepreneurial self-rebranding, some workers are more uncertain of how they can promote their personal brand effectively. With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look into how individuals can build their personal brand without spending money on materials or marketing.
The Importance of a Personal Brand
Firstly, let’s explore why a personal brand is essential today. When you are planning to turn your niche qualities into a business, it makes sense to promote your personal brand.
Essentially, it is your brand that distinguishes you from your competitors, which helps to create a lasting impression for your leads and customers alike. Without building a brand that’s attractive to your audience, it can be more difficult to build sales and sustain profit margins.
This notion can carry through to employees and founders who have their own company to work for, which, in turn, has its own brand.
Whether you are a freelancer or an employee with a strong skill set that can be appealing to other clients, businesses, or customers, it is always worth working on your own branding. Most people will be more interested in other people rather than companies in general. This means that building an audience for your personal brand can be a great means of generating more exposure.
3 Steps to Building a Personal Brand
Deciding to create a personal brand is one matter, but actually building it is another altogether. There are many different factors that need to be considered when creating your personal brand. Let’s take a deeper look at some key considerations to make:
1. Understand Your Goals
Your brand needs to be an honest reflection of yourself as an individual and as a worker. This means that you need to consider your skills, goals, and personality carefully.
Be sure to consider what motivates you, where you excel the most, what form of work you find most and least engaging, your favoured environment for completing tasks, your strongest industries to work in, and where you want to be in 10 years’ time.
Whilst many of these questions may seem vague or irrelevant right now, they are essential for helping you to gain a comprehensive understanding of what you want your personal brand to look like, and how to market yourself.
Your answers to these questions can help you to craft an image that better aligns with your ambitions and can help you to take your next career steps.
2. Take Stock of Your Key Skills
Your skills form the backbone of your brand. Here, it is essential that you take stock of your skills and incorporate them into your branding so that everybody is clear about what you can bring to the table.
To help you along at this stage, remember to consider factors like the skills you’ve picked up throughout your career and through extracurricular activities. Consider your training, qualifications, education, awards, and the mentoring you’ve received.
All of these factors have helped you to become who you are today, and they have the potential to power your brand.
It is also worth incorporating your passions and interests into your branding. Are there any industries or topics that fascinate you? Your desires can help to build a clearer picture of who you are as a person, and can help other clients or employers to understand whether you fit into their company culture.
Likewise, your core values and beliefs shouldn’t be underestimated as a valuable asset to your personal brand. Consider the values that you stand for and what you stand against and don’t be afraid to include them as part of your branding.
Although it may feel like you are limiting yourself in terms of your target audience, you could in fact better resonate with those who share the same values as yourself.
Now it is time to bring your brand to life and showcase your qualities and values to the world. Although some individuals may feel as though this part of the process can be a costly one, there are many tools that exist online that can help to convert your brand into marketing materials without breaking the bank.
One platform that’s excellent at supporting personal branding is Powered Template, which offers an array of free and premium quality templates that can be used to develop marketing materials like business cards, brochures, letterheads, flyers, and even portfolio websites.
With over 94,000 quality business resources available on the platform, Powered Template is capable of empowering users to create just about any form of marketing material to support their branding without costing the earth to create and distribute.
Although the age of remote work has paved the way for more individuals to focus on their personal branding, some have still recoiled at the notion of marketing themselves to the world.
Now, with the right blend of tools and prior research, it is possible for entrepreneurs and workers alike to showcase their qualities without spending large sums of money – making the task of building a personal brand more accessible than ever before.
I am a senior writer/columnist and have been writing about various topics and the smartphone industry over many years, my articles have been featured on NHS websites, Imperial London websites, Data-Driven Investor, Tech Crack Blog and many more.
