Entrepreneurs and their marketing teams use branding to create memorable identities for their businesses. Beyond branding their businesses, entrepreneurs must create personal brands that their customers, colleagues and employees find likable, authentic and relatable. "Entrepreneur," a resource for business owners, defines branding as creating a name, symbol or design that creates an identity for a specific product, service, business or person.
Instructions
1. Take a look at your skills, interests, abilities, education and experiences to come up with your brand. You can build a brand around being a results-driven marketer with an interest in targeting moms, or a lifestyle guru with ideas on how entrepreneurs can run their businesses and still take care of their health.
2. Determine the qualities and ideas you want people to associate with your brand. Ask friends, family and colleagues to offer up some words they associate with you to help you with this exercise. You can use words like honest, creative, quirky, forward-thinking, an innovator or selling guru to help you create the message you want to send about your personal brand.
3. Identify the tools you plan to use to help create your personal brand. Blogging tips and ideas, using social media to start conversations, holding events and attending them, releasing books and reports and offering your expert opinions to the media are all tools you can use to develop your personal brand. Use these tools to position yourself as a credible expert.
4. Seek competitors who are sending similar brand messages. Ensure that you differentiate your personal brand from other experts in related industries. Your competition could be a local blogger whose expertise is on a similar topic, or a business owner who sells the same products you offer in your boutique.
5. Take a look at the personal brand you've created and make sure it's true to who you are. If your brand isn't authentic, it will reflect in everything you do and cause customers and colleagues not to trust you. If your brand is authentic, you can insert it into everyday activities at home and in the office.
6. Attend networking events, trade shows and other events related to your industry to introduce and promote your personal brand to colleagues and customers. Attend with your business cards, a 30-second pitch about your company and goals you'd like to accomplish during the event.
7. Insert your personal brand in everything you do, from the way you dress and decorate your office to the way you answer your phone and interact with people in your life. What you do shapes your brand more than the message you are setting out to portray.
