A persona brand discovery process can help you understand how to position yourself as a top professional in your niche.
Some of the questions that should be explored in a personal brand discovery process are:
- What do you want to be known for?
- When your name enters a professional conversation, what thoughts and emotions do you want people to have?
- Which topics should you cover when you decide to write something or create a video?
- Who is your ideal client and what problems do you help them solve?
The answer to these and other important ones will arise during the brand discovery process.
Answering these questions will allow you to identify the core pillars of your personal brand. This will lead to differentiating yourself from the competition and start attracting your ideal clients by becoming the go-to thought leader in your niche.
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Why Do You Need a Personal Brand Discovery Process?
It’s likely that you are already a leader in your niche and are great at what you do.
If you are here, it means that you are looking for ways to keep growing professionally and increasing the impact you can have on others.
You’ve probably tried different things in order to increase your leadership profile. You might have ever shared some content here and there (some blogs or videos). And you might be frustrated that these efforts are not generating the expected results.
This is likely because you skipped going through a discovery process before starting to execute.
Jumping straight into creating and distributing content (speaking, writing, videos, etc.) is a great formula for failure and frustration.
What Can Be Accomplished With This Process?
The main goal is to achieve clarity.
To have a clear understanding of where you are, where you want to go, and start identifying some of the best ways to get there.
This service will give you a clear picture of the competitive landscape in your niche and what are the steps you need to take to conquer it. It will help you identify your niche, your ideal customer profile, define your customer funnel, and many other key elements that will help you become the go-to thought leader in an area you can be world-class at.
In this article, we will walk you through the deliverables and potential results you can expect from a personal branding discovery service.
What Are The Deliverables?
Below we’ll go over the 5 key steps of the personal brand discovery process:
- Conducting a personal branding audit
- Picking a niche you can dominate
- Defining your ideal client profiles
- Crafting your personal branding statement
- Understanding how to attract your ideal clients
Personal Branding Audit
We will go over your current online presence and content.
This includes a review of your website and digital assets with recommendations on what is going well and should be maintained as well as identifying the areas where there is room for improvement.
You can learn more about how to conduct a personal branding audit on our guide.
Picking a Niche
Understanding The Market
A key point of the discovery process is identifying and picking your niche.
When making this decision, some of the inputs will come from the process of defining your brand and some will come from market research.
The goal is for your ideal clients to be able to find you when they have a problem you can solve. Usually, they will search for answers on Google, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
This is why our goal is to dominate those three territories.
We conduct research on each of those platforms to identify the competition, the keywords they are dominating, and have a clear understanding of the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and end of the funnel topics that we should cover first.
You become the go-to thought leader in your niche when any search, or word-of-mouth interaction, leads to you. That is our goal.
We start with a niche. Dominate it. And then expand.
Here are some specific examples of what it means to pick a niche:
- Should you brand yourself as a “Small Business CPA” or a “Small Business Accountant”
- “Strategic CFO” or “Fractional CFO”
- “Personal Trainer”, “Wellness Coach”, or “Health Coach”
- “Career Coach” or “Executive Coach”
There are no right or wrong answers. The discovery process will give us data to make better decisions.
If “Career coach” is a keyword/positioning that is highly competitive and you don’t have the domain/page authority to rank in that niche, we might go with “Executive Coach” or another option we might find during the discovery.
Ideal Customer Profiles
Part of dominating your niche is understanding who it is that you can help the most.
Usually, we create 2 to 3 ideal customer profiles that will simplify all the efforts. Especially content creation and distribution.
This information can also be used to determine how to package your services, set pricing, define targets for ads, and much more.
Personal Branding Statement and Value Proposition
It can be challenging for you to define your personal brand because of the psychological biases that we all have.
There are some exercises that can help you define your personal brand and avoid this bias. You might have even read some books and articles on this topic… but you haven’t done anything about it yet.
Having accountability will help you get started. And the workshops we conduct are a great way to get started. We will work with you to identify your ideal personal brand statement and value proposition.
Possible Aditional Deliverables
Personal Brand Website
Ideally, you already have a website with a good on-page SEO score and domain authority.
If that is not the case, we will be able to make recommendations on how to improve these.
In the case your website doesn’t cover the baseline standards that are needed to be able to compete in today’s digital landscape, we can make some recommendations of agencies that do great websites.
Personal Brand Identity Guide
Ideally, you already have a logo and brand identity guide.
If that is not the case, we can also work with you to create your brand identity guide.
In its most basic form, this means having a logo, a color palette, and typography. This is something you’ll be able to use when creating content. Doing so will help you create a memorable impression on anyone who interacts with any type of content you create and share.
Charting Your Content Path
Here is where we define your unique process to create content.
This will depend on your preferences and skills.
If you are already creating content through speaking, webinars, presentations, podcasts, or posting on-the-go videos on social media, we use this flow of content to create written content (transcribing all these) and adapt it to the keywords that we identified as valuable.
We can also do it the other way around. Create long-form blogs that we would ghost-write (with as much of your feedback as needed) and then create the rest of the content with this as the baseline.
We would use the blog as a script and then send it to you via a teleprompter app. Then, we would produce long-form videos and short-form videos. And we would also create carousel posts and authority quotes from that content.
More on this process is explained in our personal branding marketing services article.
Here’s an example of what that would look like:
- Baseline blog
- Long-form video
- Short-form videos
- Carousel posts
- Authority quotes
How To Measure Success?
Another key step in the discovery process is to determine the data that will be tracked and measured to determine if we are on the right track.
OKRs
We will set Objectives and Key Results. These will be used as a map, with checkpoints that we will check quarterly to keep doing what is working and make the necessary changes to fix what is not working.
Define Your Funnel and KPIs
We will define key performance indicators (KPIs) in each state of your funnel.
Usually, top-of-the-funnel KPIs are:
- Number of keywords that are ranking
- Social media engagement and following growth
- YouTube video rankings
Some middle-of-the-funnel KPIs can be:
- Click-through rate to other articles on your website
- Visits to your services page
- Visits to your pricing page
Some end-of-the-funnel KPIs can be:
- Forms filled
- Booked calls
Main CTA to Deliver Value
We will work with you to determine the main assets that we want to promote so that people can have a better understanding, or a sample, of the value you can deliver for them.
This personal branding statement guide is an example of one of our main call to action to show how we deliver value. We promote this often on our social media channels and other places where we distribute content.
You never want to be too focused on sales on your distribution channels. The goal is to get people to know you, like you, and trust you. Converting them into customers is done through another CTA.
Main CTA to Convert
This is the CTA that we use to convert viewers into clients. It is usually a form or a book-a-call page.
We promote this within the content on your website. We do it AFTER you’ve delivered value through your content.
Once visitors have engaged with the right areas of your website such as the services page or the pricing page, it means they are getting closer to a buying decision and it’s on those places that we make a CTA to possibly convert them into clients.
Dashboards
We will also create a Google Data Studio dashboard, by connecting your website with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and any other connections that are necessary.
This will allow us to easily access and analyze data to identify if we are on the right track or if we need to make adjustments.
You will receive a report with highlights on a monthly basis and if you have any questions, a call can be scheduled to go into the details of the report.
Next Steps
All the information gathered and created during this phase will be a key input in the personal branding strategy phase.
You can learn more about the next steps of the process by going to our services page.
You can also learn about our pricing on our pricing page, or also on our ultimate guide to personal branding services.
Whenever you are ready you can also book a call to explore how we might be able to help you with your personal branding efforts.
