How to Create a Personal Branding Strategy in 2024

If you want to become the go-to expert in your niche, you must learn how to create a personal branding strategy.

A personal branding strategy brings clarity to the steps you need to take to get the recognition you deserve as an expert in your niche.

Also, it should consider your strengths and your long-term career goals so that the strategy can be personalized to your situation. This is achieved by mapping the journey, identifying the necessary checkpoints, and understanding the variables that should be tracked and measured to keep or adjust the course. 

Should you create content for social media? If so, which one?

Should you try to get speaking engagements? Or try to get booked as a guest on podcasts? Both?

What about trying to get featured in top publications such as Entrepreneur and Forbes?

These are a few of the typical questions that most leaders have that will be answered in this article so that you can better understand how to create a personal branding strategy in 2023. 

Fame, fortune, or freedom?

One of the most critical decisions you need to make about your personal brand is to pick the variable you will optimize.

A personal brand can help you achieve different degrees of fame, fortune, and freedom. It is important that, early on, you make a decision about which of these three is the most important for you.

As you can see in some of the examples of personal branding we’ve shared, there are many ways in which you can build a personal brand. Although both Tim Ferriss and Elon Musk have strong personal brands, they both have different levels of fame, fortune, and freedom.

Yes, all of those variables are related. Having more fame will likely mean having more fortune and freedom (to a certain extent). Also, having a fortune means that you can use it to be more famous or create more freedom for yourself. But picking one of these as the one you are optimizing for will help you make strategic decisions.

At Latinpresarios, we build personal brands that are optimized for freedom.

Our personal branding strategies are focused on helping business experts grow their businesses on autopilot. We do so with content.

If you want to optimize for fame or fortune, you might want to check some of the other personal branding agencies out there. But if the idea of freeing up your time by leveraging content to attract, educate, and convert strangers into clients sounds like something you’d like to do, stick around.

Is a personal branding strategy all about promoting myself?

One of the misconceptions about a personal branding strategy is that it’s all about self-promotion.

Yet, this couldn’t be further apart from the truth.

It’s key to use the personal branding strategy process as a moment to determine how your brand will help position you as an expert in your industry. And the only way to do so is to provide value for your audience.

Everyone who engages with your content must get something out of it.

At first, you should create content that is focused on attracting buyers so that you can see the return on investment as quickly as possible.

It is true that not all the elements of a personal branding strategy can or should be connected to revenue. But if your branding efforts don’t eventually lead to sales, then you won’t be able to sustain your efforts for as long as it takes to create meaningful change. 

A personal branding strategy must keep in mind your customer’s journey, and align with your cost of acquisition as well as your customer’s lifetime value.

The only way to develop a successful personal branding strategy is by keeping all these variables in mind.

What is the most effective personal branding strategy?

The most effective personal branding strategy is the one that is measured. Because if it’s measured, it can be improved.

The goal of dominating your niche as a thought leader, by investing in a personal branding strategy, is to get people to think about you and come to you when they are facing a problem you can solve. 

When athletes want to level up their physical and mental dominance, they go to Tim S. Grover. Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, and many other NFL, MLB, NBA, and Olympic athletes go to him. 

You don’t see Tim Grover cold-calling athletes trying to convince them they should do his program. Through his branding efforts, he positions himself so that athletes that want to dominate come to him. 

When leaders in all fields want to achieve peak performance, they go to Tony Robbins. He’s worked with 3 US Presidents, top entertainers (Aerosmith, User, Pitbull), athletes (Andre Agassi, Serena Williams, the Golden State Warriors), billionaire business leaders (Steve Wynn and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff), and many more go to him. 

You don’t see Tony convincing them to go to his events and participate in his programs. Through his personal branding efforts, he positions himself so that leaders that want to achieve peak performance come to him. 

The same happens in different industries at different levels. 

You might not be a world-class leader… yet. But I have no doubt you are at least an in-house expert. If not, you wouldn’t be reading this to find ways to get to the next level. 

I’m sure that you are known for a particular skill set or expertise in your workplace. You are likely a local expert and get invited to speak on panels at events in the city where you work.

Some people, even if that number is small, are already coming to you with some questions and problems that they know you can solve. Because of that, what you need to focus on now is increasing the number of people who know that you can solve that problem. 

By doing so, when they have that problem, they will come to you. 

But this won’t happen overnight, though. Building your current leadership capital has taken years. And it will take some time to get to the next level. 

You need a map, with a clear destination, in order to achieve your personal branding goals.

And how can you measure this process?

Your map should have clear checkpoints, timelines, and variables you can measure and track so that you can course-correct if needed or verify you are on the right track before speeding up. 

Personal branding strategy key performance indicators 

The variables you will track will be different depending on the particular strategy that is created for your personal brand. 

On average, a personal branding strategy will have at least one key performance indicator (KPI) for each step in your customer’s journey. Some of these steps are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Advocacy

Some of the variables you might want to consider tracking are:

• Keyword searches and ranking
• Brand name searches
• Click-through rate
• Average time on page (especially your long-form content)
• Views, engagement, and follows (social media channels)
• Downloads 
• Email list growth
• Forms filled
• Calls scheduled
• Deals closed
• Revenue generated

As I mentioned, these variables will be different depending on your industry, the size of your business, and many other factors. What’s important is that you have at least one variable you are tracking for each step of the journey so that you can identify where the flow is stopping and make any necessary changes.

The content pillars of your personal branding strategy

This topic can be a whole article by itself. 

Without going too deep into it, the goal is to have a clear idea of the topics you are going to talk about. Usually, it’s best to start with topics closer to a buying decision. 

Topics such as:

• Best examples of <your products/services>?
• The best <name of your service> in <your niche>
• What is the cost of <your products/services>?
• <your services> vs. <your competitor services>

These are end-of-the-funnel topics that people will likely be searching for once they are looking to invest in a solution for the problem they are facing that you can help them solve.

It’s important to start with a specific niche.

If you try to reach everyone and speak about different topics, you run the risk of not standing out. 

This is hard. I know because I struggle with this.

As you can see from our Mindful Business Book Club page, I read books on a wide variety of topics. Often, I find some insights or stories I want to share.

Most often, I end up cutting these because I realize they are not aligned with the topics I want to be known for.

My focus right now is on how to help other leaders build their personal brands to dominate their niche. If I share videos that are not related to that, I run the risk of confusing my audience. 

You should do the same. Whatever can’t be part of your content pillars, you should cut. 

It’s important NOT to share content about topics that are NOT aligned with your personal brand strategy goals. 

Conducting keyword and market research will give you insights into how to make the best decisions when picking content pillars.

Then, these pillars should play a key role in how your website is organized. This is important because you want to inform the algorithms and your audience about the problems you solve. 

How to create a personal branding strategy for social media

Learning how to create a personal branding strategy for social media is challenging.

It is key to make a decision about the channels you will leverage.

Ideally, you should at least be on LinkedIn and YouTube (because it’s one of the largest search engines).

You should make decisions about the calendar strategy, content mix, and hashtag strategy. Here are some questions that should be answered in a social media strategy document:

• At what times should I post?
• How many times a week should I post?
• What type of content should I post?

Usually, a personal branding strategy includes a mix of the following:

• Long-form video (YouTube)
• Short-form video (LinkedIn and YouTube)
• Long-form text (on your blog and distributed on social media)
• Short-from text (shared directly as a post on your feed)
• Carousel posts (by summarizing the content from the long-form posts)
• Quotes (from your content or other experts that are cited within it)
• Engagement posts (with a strong call to action to share an opinion)

All of these decisions can be simplified by relying on the creation of long-form content. 

After the long-form pieces have been approved, you can slice that into micro-content for the different channels so that not every piece of content and captions has to be approved. 

The goal is to free up time for you, the leader, to keep doing what you do best (which is solving the problems only you can solve for your audience) while you rely on a team to help you create and distribute content.

How to create a personal branding strategy in 2023?

Creating a personal branding strategy can be the step that takes you from “the best-kept secret” to being able to constantly receive inquiries from people that want to work with you and are willing to pay what you are worth.

It won’t happen overnight. But it will not happen at all if you don’t take action.

If you’d like to explore what a personal branding strategy could do for you, you can schedule a call with us.