When you think of branding, what do you think of? Big businesses? Fancy logos? Coca Cola?
It can be hard when you're a freelancer, blogger or small business to think of yourself as a brand, but you are one. If you offer any kind of service, whether it's informative blog posts or a small Etsy shop, you need to start thinking of yourself as a brand if you want to push your business to the next level.
Personal branding can take a lot of time and patience, but a lot of it is all about the planning. You might feel eager to get straight into the interesting creative part of branding yourself visually, setting up a website and getting those all important business cards printed. Before you can do any of that, you need to create a brand identity for yourself. So where should you start?
Personality
You first need to understand the personality of your business. I find that the easiest way to do this, is to think of my business as a person and ask a few important questions like:
What would they wear?
How would they talk?
What kind of music do they like?
What's their favourite colour?
That way I can get a clear idea of who this business is and what style it should have, both visually and its tone and approach to clients.
Goals and beliefs
What are your businesses main goals? what do you want to achieve with your venture?
Make sure you know exactly what kind of service you're offering and why you're offering it. Is it because you want to help others like you build a career? Is it because you want to be the best in your field? Once you know the reason behind your actions, you will have a better idea what tone of voice you want your business to have.
Having the right tone of voice is crucial as it determines what kind of clients and readers you attract. For example, if you decide your business should have a very formal and serious tone, then you will most likely attract corporate clients. If you decide you want a more informal and friendly tone of voice, you may attract more laid back creative types.
Visual branding
This is the fun part (well, for me anyway). Getting the visual part of your branding right is extremely important, as it tends to be the way people remember and associate with you. It's also extremely difficult to finalise!
To help you come up with the visual aspects of your branding, take a look back at your personality profile and keep it in mind whilst building a mood board. You can use a few different tools to do this, my favourite being good old Photoshop, but you can also use PicMonkey's collage tool.
Some of the things you want to touch on when making a mood board are:
Once you have that you can use it to design business cards, newsletters, emails, blogs and websites. Or, if that seems a little daunting, you can always look at getting a professional graphic designer to take a look and come up with some awesome ideas.
These are just the foundations of personal branding and you may find that once you get going you come up with a whole notebook of ideas for your brand. These little notes should give you a firm idea of who you are as a brand and hopefully get you noticed by your target audience.
Personality
You first need to understand the personality of your business. I find that the easiest way to do this, is to think of my business as a person and ask a few important questions like:
What would they wear?
How would they talk?
What kind of music do they like?
What's their favourite colour?
That way I can get a clear idea of who this business is and what style it should have, both visually and its tone and approach to clients.
Goals and beliefs
What are your businesses main goals? what do you want to achieve with your venture?
Make sure you know exactly what kind of service you're offering and why you're offering it. Is it because you want to help others like you build a career? Is it because you want to be the best in your field? Once you know the reason behind your actions, you will have a better idea what tone of voice you want your business to have.
Having the right tone of voice is crucial as it determines what kind of clients and readers you attract. For example, if you decide your business should have a very formal and serious tone, then you will most likely attract corporate clients. If you decide you want a more informal and friendly tone of voice, you may attract more laid back creative types.
Visual branding
This is the fun part (well, for me anyway). Getting the visual part of your branding right is extremely important, as it tends to be the way people remember and associate with you. It's also extremely difficult to finalise!
To help you come up with the visual aspects of your branding, take a look back at your personality profile and keep it in mind whilst building a mood board. You can use a few different tools to do this, my favourite being good old Photoshop, but you can also use PicMonkey's collage tool.
Some of the things you want to touch on when making a mood board are:
- Fonts for main body text, headers and logo
- Your colour scheme
- Any design elements you want to include e.g. logo images
- Any patterns and textures you want to use
- Any images of style inspiration
Once you have that you can use it to design business cards, newsletters, emails, blogs and websites. Or, if that seems a little daunting, you can always look at getting a professional graphic designer to take a look and come up with some awesome ideas.
These are just the foundations of personal branding and you may find that once you get going you come up with a whole notebook of ideas for your brand. These little notes should give you a firm idea of who you are as a brand and hopefully get you noticed by your target audience.
What would your brand look like? Have you sat down and really thought about your personal branding yet?
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