How to Build a Strong Personal Brand in Digital Marketing
Publié le 10 May 2023
A key part of creating a successful professional career is learning how to build a strong personal brand in digital marketing.
Take a look at some of your favorite marketing thought leaders in your LinkedIn feed, and you’ll see that they all have something in common: a strong personal brand.
Though large swathes of your target audience may never meet you, cultivating a personal brand will go a long way towards helping them feel like they know you on a more intimate level, and make you a more approachable and authentic choice as a professional marketer. This will help you grow in your career and reach your professional goals.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the topic of personal branding in a digital marketing context, explain why it’s an important thing to think about for marketers, and the steps you can take to build a strong personal brand in digital marketing.
What is a Personal Brand and Why Does it Matter?
A personal brand is the widely-accepted perception of an individual based on their achievements, skills and expertise within their field, as well as their personal philosophy and personality as it’s presented on public platforms. Personal branding is any work involved in cultivating this brand in a way that demonstrates your value as an individual.
Though digital marketing is increasingly driven by data and projections based on trends, the success of any marketing campaign is still driven by emotions, and having a strong personal brand is essential for anyone aiming to be a high achiever in the industry.
Here are a few of the key reasons why personal branding is important for modern marketers:
It Sets You Apart from the Crowd: The modern marketing arena is extremely competitive, and for every job, campaign, or other opportunity you set your sights on, there’s going to be countless other people and entities in your position vying for the same goal. When you have a strong personal brand you can employ in your pitches, applications, and so on, you’ll help your professional profile stand out from all the noise and maximize your chances of getting your foot in the door.
It Helps You Pass Online Vetting: In our post-social media age, it’s easier than ever for anyone to find out all about you with a few taps of their phone. With this in mind, it’s exceptionally important to control how you’re presented through online channels, and show that you’re the right person for a given job or business opportunity. When you cultivate an effective personal brand, you’ll be able to actively portray yourself in the best light possible, highlighting your best features and portfolio of work as a marketing professional and further standing out from the competition.
It Facilitates Trust in your Audience: Though the modern marketing industry and jobs market has opened up new opportunities for countless people, it’s also created a layer of insulation between individuals and outside entities which needs to be accounted for. With a remote-first working culture, marketers can progress through every stage of a job interview process without ever meeting someone face-to-face, detracting from a certain level of trust which had existed in professional relationships in times gone by.
How to Build a Strong Personal Brand in Digital Marketing
Building a strong personal brand in digital marketing can make all the difference when you’re taking the next step in your career or looking to develop a business venture. If you’re looking to optimize your online presence and craft a self brand you can be proud of, here’s three key things to focus on as you develop your own personal branding strategy.
Hone a Unique Point of View
One of the most important parts in any successful personal branding drive is setting yourself apart through a distinctive point of view.
While it’s easy to go with the pressures and trends of your industry, embracing your more disruptive opinions and being unapologetic in expressing the way you view things will help you stand out from all the surrounding noise and avoid falling into the trap of sounding like your peers.
Aside from giving your content a more immediate sense of intrigue and helping you garner more attention to your online activity, developing a unique point of view will also help you carve out a more specific target market within the digital marketing community, and put you in contact with the kinds of employers and clients who are best matched for your professional profile.
Showcase Your Expertise
Developing a unique point of view will help your content to stand out and draw in some initial attention, but your expertise is what will make people stick with it and find the value in what you have to say.
Try to take stock of your digital marketing skills and experience, and try to figure out what sets your professional background apart from your competitors. Whether it’s a specific marketing discipline like link building, or a more far-reaching specialism like the psychology of advertising, giving your personal brand a distinct knowledge-based USP will go a step further in showing your audience you’re offering something they can’t find elsewhere.
Creating a website where you can showcase your expertise with a portfolio of your completed work and testimonials from satisfied clients can be very helpful. With the help of a logo generator and free web design tools you can have a personal brand that looks professional and is very affordable.
When you combine this specific expertise with a unique and disruptive view of your industry, you’ll quickly be able to position yourself as a uniquely valuable source of content and a go-to primary source for your area of expertise.
Prioritize Consistency
Like the brand of a business, your personal brand in digital marketing must maintain a high level of consistency across all possible touchpoints in order to develop brand recognition and avoid any kind of confusion that can happen when you’re spread across disparate platforms.
Set some time aside to think about how you’re presenting yourself through visual and text-based mediums wherever people can find you online, and find ways to consolidate the way you’re portrayed across all of it.
Actions like using the same profile picture and cover photo across all social media accounts, dressing in a certain style of clothing, and maintaining a single color scheme across original visual content, can all work to reinforce your professionalism and help your audience identify you at a glance.
Building Your Brand
In a digital-first business arena where every opportunity has countless people vying for it, having a strong personal brand can make all the difference to your success as a digital marketing professional.
If you are wondering how to build a strong personal brand in digital marketing, we hope this guide has given you a solid introduction to the topic of personal branding. With these tips, you can get off to a great start as you develop your professional persona and forge a closer relationship with your target audience.
