The Basics of Personal Branding: How to Refine Your Personal Brand

Personal branding is defined as the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. This is a new concept, because previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, while the personal-branding concept suggests that success comes from self-packaging.

Think of it this way: people often purchase a product or service because of branding. They can see the concept behind something and the goal of the brand, and want to purchase that brand because of what it stands for or what they can gain from it. With your personal brand, you are trying to show others why they should believe in you, what you stand for, and what you can bring to the table professionally. It’s important to create a distinct personal brand and figure out how to refine your personal brand to meet your professional goals and objectives.

Creating Your Personal Brand. When creating your personal brand, you want to think about and answer the following questions:

• How do you see yourself?
• What do you want people to see when they look at you/your work?
• What is your mission/goal?
• What can you bring to the table?
• What makes you different/why would someone want to work with you or hire you instead of another person?

Refining Your Personal Brand: You’ve figured out what you want and how you want to come across to other people, so now you have to take the steps to make that happen. The most important thing about refining your personal brand for the professional world is to keep it consistent. Make sure your work, your verbiage, and your voice is consistent throughout the materials you present.

Focus on Consistency: For example, if you’re using your middle initial in the header of your resume (i.e. Joe M. Schmoe) use that same written presentation on all of your documents and professional profiles. Don’t switch between “Joe Schmoe” and “Joe M. Schmoe” because the inconsistency may get confusing.

Your resume, cover letter, LinkedIn, personal business card, and appearance should all give off the same impression. For an example, look at writestylesonline.com and compare it to the Instagram @writestyles and Facebook page /writestylesonline. When looking at all 3 platforms, it is clear that it’s the same brand, and that carries over to my business card, resume, and style as well. You want everything to be uniform. If you work with certain colors, stick with those. For me that’s mainly black and white with an accent color of lime green.

With your resume, note that it should be very similar to your LinkedIn profile, so that if someone looks between the two, they are getting the same information. Think of LinkedIn as a resume where someone can also see your pictures and your networking capabilities. If you have different information on your resume and LinkedIn, a hiring manager may be skeptical of what information is true, or wonder why you have inconsistent information between platforms.

The goal of consistency with your marketing materials is that someone will look at them and immediately know that they’re yours, and see the image that you want to portray.

Dress the Part: If you want a job with more authority or a job in a certain industry, dress for the part. If you want to become an executive, dress as if you already are an executive. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. This age old saying has a lot of truth to it, because your clothing affects your ability to communicate and how well respected you become. For someone to claim that they want to be the boss but dress in ripped jeans and a t shirt is completely contradictory. Chances are that this person and their goals aren’t taken seriously in the workplace.

Follow the written and non-written dress code to ensure that you’re in line with other industry professionals. If the written dress code says that you can wear jeans to work, but everyone in the office is always dressed in slacks, skirts, and blazers, it’s important to follow the unwritten rules and dress appropriately so you don’t look less professional than others. Similarly, if you want to work in a medical or scientific field, there will most likely be specific guidelines to what you can and cannot wear to keep contaminants at bay.

Personal branding is essential to market yourself correctly in your career. By packaging and marketing yourself correctly, you will be able to manipulate how people view you, enabling you to secure the career of your dreams. If you’re able to show people that you can do it and that your work will benefit them, you’ll be able to reach all of your professional goals and aspirations.