If you’re familiar with the term brand, then you may be familiar with how it can reflect and shape a business.

Example:
Target, a red circular logo with a dot in the middle-representative of the brand’s name: Target. Their soft warm lighting and open floor plan, and willingness to appeal to their demographic are shown in their merchandise and store layout. Target is a brand that is for the ‘everyday’ person, and they often update their marketing strategy to reflect their demographic, but their brand doesn’t change.

What is a personal brand?

Nikita Dragun, Cher, and Dolly Parton have extremely iconic personal brands before the term personal brand was even a thing. They know who they are, and they own it. But for the rest of us, finding words and descriptive terms to define who we are can feel challenging. Especially if people already assume they know everything about you based on how you speak and act, and the way you look.

With social media, we can control some of this, while not being able to get rid of complete bias, we can also create and curate the ‘life’ or person we want people to believe we have.

There are three key factors in building a personal brand:

Who you are

What you do

What your goal is

Here’s an image to help define who you are with an example.

The goal behind this exercise is to define your brand to align with your business goals.

From there, we can form an ideal short paragraph. Here’s mine:

Rina Lo is a qualified business owner with a background in social media marketing and public relations. Rina uses their various creative skills and time management to enact change and meet deadlines that fit the market demographics of X brands. Rina Lo is open to multiple business ventures and collaborations. Rina is a lifelong learner.

What is your online business path? Was this helpful for you?