There are some key points to learn why personal branding is important: mainly, it makes you a better professional and gives you the opportunity to create a new source of income.
However, it also allows you to get to know yourself better than before, create a better network, have a bigger understanding of your own industry, gather an ideal community, control how you see yourself, and many more.
Remember that a personal brand is the combination of thoughts, opinions and ideas people have about you, especially when you’re not in the room.
By each year that passes by, personal brand becomes more and more important.
In fact, 65% of Internet users consider online sources to be the most trustworthy about people and companies.
This proves that building personal branding online can make a positive impact on your business and your career.
In this article you will find our 7 top reasons on why personal branding is important for you.
Above all, a personal brand is important because it will make people trust you more than before.
When reading our insights, keep in mind that:
If people like you, they will listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.
Zig Ziglar
Join us in this blog to keep reflecting on why personal branding is important!
Contents
You Get to Know Yourself Better
Every successful personal brand starts by asking the right questions.
These mostly are questions you haven’t asked yourself before.
When building a personal brand at Latinpresarios, the first thing you go through is a discovery process.
Partly, this is the moment to reflect on what you want to achieve, how you’re going to reach those goals and what are the tools you’re counting on to do so.
Nevertheless, it’s much more than that.
If you want to build a strong personal brand, you must be conscious about your core values, your strengths, your weaknesses, the challenges you could overcome and the ones you might not be ready—just yet.
Personal branding requires constant introspection and communication with yourself.
You will also need to be completely honest about your goals, skills and professional desires.
Anyone who decides to take the step to take the mask off and tell their story is a person who becomes more aware of themselves in every area.
On the other hand, it’s not only about getting to know yourself but defining the aspects you are not 100% sure about.
You will need to answer questions such as: “what are your passions?”, “what are your biggest professional goals?”, and other inquiries that might feel at first a little too abstract.
You can check out our personal branding template to begin this journey by yourself and have an idea of what kind of challenges you will face.
You Create a Better Network
No matter the field you work in or the career you studied: you probably have already heard lots of times the importance networking has.
It’s not about how you can benefit from a particular person, as we might sometimes think.
It’s about creating meaningful relationships.
In very little words, networking consists of:
- Building relationships that are based on trust.
- Strengthening your interpersonal skills.
- Giving support and value to the people you connect with.
- Manage your expectations.
- And much more!
One of the main answers to why personal branding is important is that it will help you grow your network with valuable relationships that benefit both sides.
In order to do this successfully, you must know your particular reasons for networking and what are the goals you’re trying to achieve through this activity.
Once you have these answers, you’ll be able to find the right people.
Some tips we have for your networking with a personal brand are:
- Always try to be the first to make contact or offer something.
- Interact with colleagues on different social media platforms.
- Work on your relationships over time.
- Attend online and offline networking events.
You Have a Bigger Understanding of Your Industry
One of the many amazing things about personal branding, is that they open the door to a whole new world of information and experiences.
This isn’t only about yourself, as we explained earlier in this article, but about your industry, the people you have worked with and the opportunities you could aim for.
When working on your personal brand, you will eventually have chances to attend different kinds of events, such as:
- Workshops.
- Classes.
- Interviews.
Or even get involved in partnerships and/or get a promotion at your job.
These are all situations that expand your vision about your field and allow you to learn more about your career and what you love doing.
No industry has only one facet: all of them have many things to share with the world and it’s now your turn to get to know them and benefit from them.
You Gather an Ideal Community
Building a community of people that follow you and genuinely like your content it’s a process that could easily take years.
However, you can start seeing results quite quickly if you commit to your strategy and are true to yourself.
A personal brand achieves two main objectives that come in handy when building your ideal community.
- It gives you credibility.
- And it inspires trust in your audience.
These two points may seem very similar, but there are important differences between them.
Your credibility is built on top of many elements.
Some of these are:
- Your name recognition: how familiar your name is to your audience.
- Your features: such as interviews, guest posts and more. This answers the question: do your colleagues also recognize you as an expert in your area?
- Your experience and education: you may display this information on LinkedIn.
- Your consistency when posting on social media and your website.
It is also measurable, since you can “prove” these aspects with different types of content and credentials.
You should always be checking your profiles to find “breaches” in your credibility, since almost half of 75% of the US adults who Google themselves have reported that the results aren’t positive.
We don’t want to fall into that percentage, and the best way to prevent that is by building a strong personal brand online and offline.
On the other hand, you will find trust.
While credibility can be a way of building trust, it’s not the only one.
For example: part of building trust is being relatable.
Nowadays, no one likes someone who portrays themselves as a know-it-all.
Users rather connect and learn with someone who feels close to them, and also has the potential of teaching them something.
You can be relatable by being yourself and constantly posting on your different platforms.
You should also be memorable.
On average, it takes five to seven impressions for someone to remember a brand.
This should also be proof and reminder for you to post consistently.
However, you could try harder and produce content that will make stronger impressions, which could eventually lead to people remembering you easily.
The most professional and successful personal brands are the ones that can’t be forgotten by their audiences.
The only way to do this is by being strategic about your impressions and the way you show yourself to the world every single day.
By following these two paths and other recommendations, you will be able to gather a community that believes in your values and goals, and therefore push you to be the best version of yourself you can achieve.
You Start Controlling How You Show Yourself
Sometimes, we are what external situations make of us.
When we don’t work on our personal brand, we don’t actively think about what our actions communicate to others.
Even though it’s important to enjoy life and don’t overthink every single one of your words and dialogues, building a personal brand it’s a great way to claim ownership of your own image, online and offline.
By branding yourself, producing valuable content, networking and engaging in other personal branding-related activities, you’ll be strengthening your image.
You should also think that nowadays, chances are that someone will always be googling you.
Maybe it is the recruiter from the new job you’re applying to, a potential client, or even a person you just went on a date with, it doesn’t have to be work-related necessarily!
It’s important you keep in mind the way you portray yourself to the world, since more people will be finding you.
You Obtain More Opportunities
By making a personal brand, you put yourself out in the world and expose your image.
Now, everyone can find you, get to know you, learn from your content and engage with your discourse.
By building a strategy and implementing it, you will stand out from the crowd and highlight all your skills.
Opportunities could go from generating a whole new income source, managing clients and being known in your industry; to finding a new and better job, reaching your life goals, getting to know yourself and going to your next professional level.
You Become More Confident
No matter how experienced you are in your industry: you probably have some insecurities when it comes to your skills.
We’ve all been there.
Even the most professional individuals can doubt themselves when new challenges come in the way.
During the process of building your own brand, you’ll be constantly expanding your comfort zone and learning new elements about yourself and everything that surrounds you.
You’ll also find yourself working with people and in situations you never imagined before. That’s part of the growth.
Your confidence will inevitably grow because after those challenges, you will see that you overcame them and everything went well.
Insecurities will reduce because you will know how you worked in previous experiences and trust more in your own skills.
Building your personal brand means to deeply examine yourself and be your principal working tool, so make sure to optimize it!
Why Personal Branding Is Important?
Personal branding has a gigantic list of benefits.
However, in this article we summarize them in 7 bullet points.
- You get to know yourself better
- You create a better network
- You have a bigger understanding of your industry
- You gather an ideal community
- You start controlling how you show yourself
- You obtain new opportunities
- You become more confident
These aspects sum up all the good changes that could arrive to your life by building a personal brand.
Having a personal brand in the modern world (one with the Internet and Covid-19), it’s definitely a challenge, but also a huge opportunity.
There are plenty of platforms, events, mentors and users that are looking for someone to provide valuable content.
All of these elements will be of good use in your path to become the best professional you can be.
If you feel inspired by these benefits, you can start building your personal brand on your own.
If you want to learn about other people’s experiences with personal brands, check out our blog about it.
Finally, you can book a free call with us, learn more about our services, our mission and commitment with your future.
