Table of Contents
Introduction
Branding these days is not just limited to big businesses. Personal branding has become a popular way for individuals to market themselves, and it can be a great way to get ahead in your career.
Saying so, how can I not mention the best example of Personal branding – Gary Vaynerchuk? If you don’t know who he is, Gary is a Serial entrepreneur, investor, author, public speaker, and internet personality. He is the chairman of VaynerX, a modern-day media and communications holding company, and the active CEO of VaynerMedia, a full-service advertising agency servicing Fortune 500 clients across the company’s 4 locations.
While it may seem like Gary was born into his success, that’s not the case. He’s built his impressive career through a lot of hard work, and automation.
Gary is a big proponent of using automation to scale businesses, and he’s used it himself to grow his brand. If you’re looking to do the same, here’s a guide to automating your personal branding.
What is personal branding and why is it important?
Personal branding is the process of promoting oneself to build credibility and authority. It reflects a person’s expertise, experience, popularity, and knowledge that can be helpful to others.
Personal branding is important because it allows you to build trust with your audience. When done correctly, personal branding can help you attract more opportunities, grow your business, and advance your career.
How to create a personal branding strategy?
The fact of the matter is, that there is no one-size-fits-all branding strategy. The reason is – YOU are unique, and so should be your branding strategy.
However, some key steps help you create an effective personal branding strategy:
- Know yourself: The first step is to get to know yourself. It includes understanding your values, strengths, weaknesses, passions, and skills. Once you have a good understanding of who you are, you craft your brand.
- Find your niche: The next step is to find your niche. This is the group of people you want to target with your personal brand. When finding your niche, it’s important to consider your skills, experiences, and what you have to offer.
- Define your goals: Once you know who you are and who you want to target, the next step is to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with your personal brand? Do you want to grow your business, attract new clients, or advance your career?
- Create and curate your content: After you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to start creating and curating content. It can include blog posts, articles, social media updates, videos, and more. Remember that your content must align with your goals and target audience. Finally, it must be of high quality and must benefit the audience.
- Promote your brand: The final step is to promote your brand. You can use several channels, such as social media, blogging, speaking engagements, and networking to do so. The goal is to get your brand in front of as many people as possible.
Follow these simple steps to create an effective personal branding strategy and achieve your goals.
Putting automation to work for personal brand
If you’re serious about personal branding, automation is the key. Automating most of your workflows helps you focus on the important tasks, rather than getting bogged down in the small stuff.
We have curated a few automation that can help you take your personal branding to the next level:
- To-Dos: Automate your to-do list so that you never forget an important task. This can be done through a variety of apps, such as Trello or Asana.
- Reminders: Automated reminders can help you keep on top of your branding tasks. For example, you can set up reminders to post to social media, update your blog or send out newsletters. This way, you’ll never miss a beat and your branding will always be on point.
- Email Communication: Email is a great way to keep in touch with your audience and promote your brand. However, manually sending emails can be time-consuming. Setting up automation like autoresponders can help you save time and keep your audience engaged.
- Lead capture: If you’re using your personal brand to grow your business, lead capture is essential. Lead capture automation can help you collect leads from your website, social media, or email list and store them in a central location. This makes it easy to follow up and close sales.
- Social Media: Social media is a great way to promote your brand and connect with your audience. However, manually posting updates can be time-consuming. Automating your social media posts can help you save time and ensure that your branding is always on point. In case you also have a blog, you can also set up automation to post your blog updates on social media.
- YouTube: YouTube is a powerful platform for promoting your brand. If you create videos as part of your branding strategy, automation can help you save time and grow your channel. For example, you can set up automation to post new videos on social media or email your subscribers when you upload a new video.
- Notification: Automated notifications can help you stay on top of your branding tasks. For example, you can set up notifications for when someone mentions you on social media, comments on your blog, or subscribes to your email list. This way, you can quickly respond and continue the conversation.
- Backup: Automated backups can help you protect your hard work in case something goes wrong. For example, if you accidentally delete a file or your website crashes, you can quickly restore everything with a backup. This way, you won’t have to start from scratch and you can get back to promoting your brand.
- Analytics: Automated analytics can help you track your branding progress and measure your success. This way, you can see what’s working and adjust your strategy accordingly.
To help you set up such automation, there are plenty of integration tools available in the market. These tools help the apps to communicate with each other and share data. This saves you from having to do it manually. Utilize additional tools that will give your client payment reminders. You can use an online tool to create invoices to aid you with automatic client payment reminders. Thus, your follow-up workload will be light.
Some of the most popular integration tools are Integrately, Zapier, Microsoft’s Power Automate, Outfunnel, etc. However, all these integration tools come with their own set of features, advantages and disadvantages, and pricing. Hence, you must always do a thorough comparison of these before zeroing in on one.
Measure the success of personal branding efforts
Setting up a website or your social media channels is just one part of the game. You also need to measure the success of your personal branding efforts to see if you’re on track.
Here are a few metrics you can use to measure the success of personal branding:
- Website traffic: Track the number of visitors to your website to see if your branding efforts drive more traffic. Use Google Analytics for the same.
- Social media followers: Keep track of the number of social media followers you have. This metric helps see if your branding efforts increase your reach and engagement.
- Email subscribers: Count the number of email subscribers you have to gauge the interest level in your brand and content.
- Leads: Keep track of the leads you generate from personal branding efforts to see if you’re successfully growing your business.
- Sales: Track the sales you close as a result of personal branding efforts to check if your branding translates into revenue.
- Engagement: Measure the engagement you’re getting from personal branding efforts. This helps you find out if people are interacting with your brand and content.
- Mentions: Track the number of times you are tagged or mentioned online. This helps you estimate the spreading of the word.
- Forward: Count the number of times your content is shared online. This metric can help you see if people are interested in what you have to say and if they’re sharing your message with others.
There are a variety of other metrics you can use to measure the success of your branding efforts. Choose the metrics that are important to you and track your progress over time.
Tips for staying consistent with personal branding across all channels
Many times, people give up on personal branding because they find it hard to stay consistent with it. If you’re struggling to stay consistent, here are a few tips that can help:
- Set realistic goals: Don’t try to do too much at once. Set realistic goals for your branding efforts and focus on achieving those.
- Create a schedule: It helps you stay on track with your branding efforts. Decide how often you want to update your website or social media channels and stick to that schedule.
- Automate where possible: Automating your branding can help you save time and stay consistent.
- Outsource: If you’re struggling to find the time to do personal branding, consider outsourcing some of the tasks. This can help you stay on track without having to sacrifice your other commitments.
- Hire a virtual assistant: A virtual assistant can help you with a variety of tasks related to personal brandings, such as creating content, scheduling posts, and responding to comments.
Bottom Line
Personal branding is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time and effort to build a successful personal brand. But if you’re consistent with your efforts, you can see success over time. Automation will help you to keep up your consistency. So gear up for your personal branding journey and see it through to the end.
All the best!