Branding is an essential part of growing your online identity and business. While you may not associate branding with personal accounts, everyone can benefit from branding, no matter their industry. There’s more to branding than just creating a logo. Branding goes further than the standard corporatization associated with the name. 

Brand recognition extends to nearly everything online; whether a recognizable profile picture or a relatable video style, branding acts as an identifier that allows your audience to recognize you instantly. Let’s discuss how branding can work for personal brands and how to build your brand awareness across several social media sites. 

Critical Parts of Personal Branding

Before we get into ways to build your brand, let’s go over some of the critical parts of personal branding. First, being recognizable is crucial to making any brand. This recognition is especially true for personal brands, where your personality and general style do the advertising work for you. 

Some key components to building brand recognition include:

• A Logo: This is how your audience recognizes your brand. We’ll discuss how a logo is more than just an image and how you can use it to encapsulate your business or personal brand. 
• Tone and Content Styles: Part of building any brand is ensuring you know your niche. Building a brand around a recognizable set of topics while keeping a consistent tone and aesthetic in your posts and across your accounts can make a huge difference in branding. 
• A Consistent Main Topic: Make sure your social media accounts stick to posting “on-brand” content. For example, if McDonald’s suddenly started posting about sushi recipes, their audience may need clarification.

Importance of a Logo

While many people associate logos with corporations and large companies, a headshot can be a logo for your personal brand. Think of famous YouTubers, influencers, or even celebrities; these people have personal brands built around their identity, meaning their headshots are their logos. 

A logo ensures customers can instantly recognize your brand, giving your business legitimacy and helping foster customer trust in your personal brand. 

Tone and Content Styles

You want to keep your content styles consistent, including the tone of which you write or speak in. For example, if you’re filming videos for your personal brand, keep your filming techniques constant across your content. There’s room for new, experimental content, but make sure the content you create follows a central theme or content style, in general, to help establish your brand identity. For content writing, this can include things like general tone goals, wording, and level of formality. 

A Consistent Main Topic

Your followers follow your personal brand for a reason, and catering to that expectation can help grow your personal brand. While it’s okay to talk about other topics here and there on your social media, your customers identify your brand with a specific style, and that style includes consistent content. So, for example, if your personal brand is about haircare, posting primarily about that topic is key to your brand. 

Think about an artist’s style. For example, you’d need clarification if you went to an exhibit about Van Gogh and expected to see some of his more famous paintings only to find out he’d moved on to sculpture. While you may stick around to check out the statues, for the most part, anyone interested in his paintings would slowly trickle off. The same concept applies to your social media accounts and your brand. While exploring new niches is okay, most of your audience associates your brand with a specific topic, so continue producing that content. 

This concept still applies if you want to upgrade your branding. Finding a topic to focus on and producing content across all your accounts can help target a niche and build brand recognition. 

If you’re interested in more ways to build your personal brand, we can help. At Planted Marketing, we use our experience to help small and mid-sized brands reach their target audience. So whether you’re starting your business from the ground up or are looking to restructure your social media accounts, we’re here to help. Contact us today to learn more. 

Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency created for small to mid-size businesses, start-ups, and personal brands. We customize our plans to fit the business at each stage of growth. Want to learn more? Send us a message at info@plantedmarketing.com. Talk soon!