What is Branding and How To Build A Personal Brand

BrandingMarketing Tips

Aug 5

Written By brandmerry

What is Branding and How To Build A Personal Brand

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

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If you didn’t already know, at Brandmerry, we focus on two key elements for building a business, both branding and marketing. And today I want to share with you a snippet from my free on-demand training called the Build a Better Brand Method.

Inside of this free video training, I share with you the signature framework that I have used to support hundreds of entrepreneurs in building a scalable brand that just feels really f*cking good.

It feels like them.
It's a strong personal brand.
They get to show up and do their thing online in a way that feels amazing.

This free on-demand training is available for you to watch if you go to betterbrandmethod.com, but I thought it would be really fun to give you a little teaser.

I'm going to share with you what personal branding is.

I'm also going to break down my signature branding framework. This is the six-part framework that I teach inside of my program You Branded. Inside of the training, you are getting the entire framework step-by-step, plus what happens at each level and how each level builds to the next.

After you dive into this blog (or listen to the audio above), I encourage you to go to betterbrandmethod.com to sign up for this on-demand training because in addition to what you're hearing today, you are also going to get some amazing content on the training around storytelling, writing your brand messages, doing ideal client work and more.

WHAT IS A BRAND

I want you to start thinking about the brand as the ultimate experience that you are creating for your potential customers.

It's made up of the feeling and the connection that someone has about the experience that you've given them online.

It's made up of the stories, the emotional connection, and different experiences as a whole.

If they watch a video from you, if they see an Instagram post from you, if you have a business, then personal branding allows you to create a deeper, personal connection with your audience that will build trust.

It ultimately goes deeper than just a product or service. Yet, so many people make the mistake of branding around a product or service when they start.

I don't want you to do that because things are going to change within your business over time and you don’t want to have to shift your branding as a result.

Your product or service is not a brand.

A brand needs to be about the business as a whole, the company as a whole, you as a whole showing up as your true self because as we'll learn, purchase decisions are made based on human connection.

They're not made because of that product that you're selling, because I bet you, someone else has the exact same thing.

We all know it's true.
We know what our industry looks like.

But you can stand out and you can become profitable when you focus on building your personal brand.

Think about your brand as the beating heart of your business.
Without it, you won't have anything.

In fact, Richard Branson said, “The way a company brands itself is everything. It will ultimately decide whether or not your business survives.”

So, remember it's essential.

WHY YOUR PERSONAL BRAND IS IMPORTANT

So why is your personal brand important?

We've talked a little bit about it, but let's break down some of the key pieces.

REASON #1 TO CREATE A PERSONAL BRAND FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Your ideal customer is shopping around, right? We all know that. Let's not pretend it's not happening.

It is part of the client buying process.

So why would they choose your product or service over someone else that offers the same thing?

Your brand.

There was a study done by Harvard University that found that we make purchase decisions based on an emotional connection that we feel. So, although we think it is because we list out how many modules are in something, or how many videos they get, or how many calls, someone's made a decision by that point.

That logistical information might help them to commit today, but they've already decided based on a connection.

That's why creating a personal brand is so essential. It allows you to share more story, it allows you to build connections, and they ultimately will move through the buying process faster.

REASON #2 TO CREATE A PERSONAL BRAND FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Branding also impacts every single element of your business.

You cannot have a website without a solid brand.
You cannot show up on social media without a solid brand. You won't know what to say.
You won't know what aesthetics to choose.
You won't know what you're ultimately leading people to.

You can't have a solid marketing strategy without a solid brand, because so much of your marketing strategy relies on your ideal customer and your messaging.

You can't advertise without a solid brand because you won’t know who to target or how best to communicate with them.

Your copy will suck if you don't have a solid brand because your messaging will be less than mediocre and you will not stand out and will not convert. Your content creation will fall flat.

In fact, many entrepreneurs who have had their business for a while come to me because they're having trouble staying consistent with their content.

When we fill the holes in their brand, suddenly it all works and makes sense again. Your brand impacts every element of your business.

WHY DO YOU NEED BRAND STORYTELLING?

So what role does storytelling play in branding?

I've talked about storytelling a lot on the Brandmerry Blog.

When you integrate story into your content, it is 22 times more likely to be remembered. This includes copy on your homepage, email, advertisement copy, social media, all of it.

That is because storytelling has major effects on the brain. Inside of your audience’s brain, there's dopamine firing, there's neuro coupling happening.

I think just this stat in and of itself as an entrepreneur always spoke to me because if I'm going to take the time and the energy to create content, which we all are because it's important when you're building an online business, I want to make sure that people actually remember it.

In addition to the power of storytelling, 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like and support.

Now, this comes down to being your true self online and building a brand around that rather than something you think people might want.

81% of consumers said that they need to be able to trust a brand in order to buy from them.

This again is where storytelling and personal branding comes into play. Storytelling is such a great way to build connections so that people feel like they know you and they can trust you. And as we mentioned before, it's oftentimes the reason someone will make a decision between two very similar products.

If you Google photographers near you, you're going to have a lot of options.
Why are your ideal customers ultimately going to choose one over the other?

It's going to come down to trust and an emotional connection.

And to close out my statistical rant, 64% of consumers around the world said that they would buy from a brand or boycott it solely because of its position on a social or political issue.

Your story, your values, and your mission are the foundation of your brand and will help you communicate these things with your audience, stand your ground, and speak up on the things that your audience cares about most.

BRANDMERRY 6-PART BRAND FRAMEWORK (STEP-BY-STEP)

All right. Let's dive into this six-part framework, that we call the Build a Better Brand Method.

Phase One: Story

At this stage, the emphasis is on identifying your strengths, your transitions, things that you've gone through in your life, different paths that you've taken, and experiences to ultimately define your niche and create your profitable brand story.

This is when you're really getting in touch with who you are as a person and the different things that you want to provide, the mission, and your values so that you can ultimately carve out your little pocket inside of your industry.

Remember, a lot of us are offering the same exact thing.

I'm not oblivious to the fact that there are other people offering branding work and supporting people with their branding but I found based on my story and my experiences, my little pocket, and then from that am able to create a really profitable brand story.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Profitability comes from your specific niche and by using your story from the get-go to define your expertise and your strengths, you'll easily incorporate it into your brand as a whole. Many people make the mistake of saying this is my niche, because they're like this is the product that I want to sell, and then that's their niche.

You can niche down based on your credentials, your expertise, your experiences to give you a leg up in your industry. It's one of the things that I did when I was starting out as well.

So this is the first stage. You need to understand and get super clear on your story before you can move on to the next piece and at the end of this phase, you're ultimately going to know your specific niche and how you're really going to use your superpowers to stand out in your industry.

Phase TWO: Your Customer

That leads us to the second phase. Phase two is all about your customer.

Once you've identified who you are, your strengths, your story, and those experiences that you want to share, now we move into who you're talking to.

Who do you ultimately want to attract to your brand?

Now at this stage, the emphasis is on identifying deeper layers of your ideal customer. This is ultimately who your brand will be supporting and doing the research to better understand who they really are is essential.

Too many people skip this step. You might be one of them. I was. I did it. I skipped the step in the beginning and guess what? I didn't make any money.

So when you get back down to the customer market research, you are able to really know your ideal customer, which is going to play a role in everything that you are going to create moving forward. And yes, it's going to take a little bit of time, but I promise it's going to be worth it in the end.

In fact, the knowledge that comes from deep ideal client market research will impact your overall messaging, your overall copywriting, the words that you are going to use on your website and social media and your overall marketing strategy.

Because how do you know where to show up and market if you don't know who you're trying to attract?

The second phase is going deeper into really understanding who your customers are. I'll give you a little hint on this one. It's not just the demographics that everybody stresses about.
What is their age?
Are they married?
Do they have kids?

No. We're going deeper than that. We're thinking about what their struggles are.
What are their weaknesses?
What are their strengths?
What keeps them up at night?
What do they ultimately want?
Why do they want it?
What's standing in their way?

Those are just some examples of the questions that we need to be asking ourselves when it comes to phase two of the branding framework.

Phase Three: Your Messaging

Phase three is your messaging. How do you communicate and tie those pieces together to bring in and attract your ideal customer?

At this stage, the emphasis is on consistency. It's one of my favorite words.

Crafting messages that really represent your brand as a whole, not just the individual offer.

You will notice, I haven't talked about a single product or offer yet. Because we're talking about the brand as a whole, we're talking about the experience. How are you ultimately supporting your ideal customer to go from where they are to where they want to be?

This is important because a consistent presentation of a brand has seen to increase revenue by 33%. Look, we can all get every little bit that we can, right?

The messaging consistency will make sure that your overall brand message never gets confusing and is super clear to your ideal customer, meaning that the brand as a whole solves the problem and then the individual products or services go into the logistics of how you do that.

Phase three is focused on communicating your strengths, your expertise, the experience that you're providing with what you know about your ideal customer, what they want, what's standing in their way, all of those things and crafting it into messaging for your brand as a whole.

Phase Four: The Offer

That leads us to four, which is crafting your signature offer.

Now at this stage, the emphasis is on building your core offer and signature framework. I know it's really tempting to start off with a million offers out of the gate. If you're just starting off or you're having trouble selling what you currently have, strip it back, become known for something, build a reputation around something, get results around something, and then add more offers down the line.

So inside of You! Branded, I specifically tell my clients, we are focused on one thing right now. Let's get good at that one thing and then scale.

At this stage, you want to determine the pillars, the phases of your offer, much like the one that you're seeing right now. And that will allow you to monetize more consistently. This is really important because part of the branding process is figuring out what you're going to monetize.

But many people either do it too early and then they've got nothing to back it up, or they figure out their brand and then they create their offer and then their brand and the offer aren't connected.

It only makes sense to craft a signature offer that can scale with your brand over time. Don't do it backwards or you're going to find yourself very confused with communicating your offer and your brand and all the different things.

Phase Five: Your Voice

We cannot create a personal brand without talking about your voice, the voice of the brand, the voice of the company, how you're going to show up.

So at this stage, the emphasis is on defining the authentic voice of the brand, of the characteristics to make sure that your true personality is coming through online. Many of you are most likely starting out as solopreneurs, meaning it's you with a business idea and a plan in place and you're going forward with it.

Showing up and sharing your story and building that trust is going to be incredibly helpful. That's how I started as well.

Even though my company Brandmerry isn't my name Michelle Knight, I'm still able to build a personal brand because again, we're focused on personal connection. I know that someone is ultimately going to decide to work with me or maybe purchase my services because they have felt a connection to me over somebody else that may offer the same thing.

This is the stage where you want to identify your brand values as we talked about in the beginning. How you want to be perceived and your mission.

Then you'll be able to use those to communicate with your audience, not just through your copy in your messaging, but also with your aesthetics. This is important because authenticity matters.

81% of survey consumers said that they need to be able to trust a brand in order to buy from them. That's a pretty big number.

Defining your authenticity from the start will allow you to show up 100% as yourself online and maintain and build deeper trust with your audience.

Phase Six: Connection

And that leads us to phase six, which is all about connection. Now in this stage, the emphasis is on building an emotional connection with your audience. Studies show that we make purchase decisions based on an emotional connection. So you want to determine this while branding so that it flows not only through your copy, not only through your aesthetics, the visuals, the photos, the colors, the fonts but also in your marketing efforts as well.

This is a very, very, very important part of the process.

Many branding mentors, coaches, educators, course creators do not teach the importance of emotional branding. This is something that I have become known for in my industry. And as we know, purchase decisions are based on an emotional connection so it is important.

It's not enough to have a great product. It's not going to lead to consistent revenue. Your audience needs to feel something from you.

There are a lot of different ways to do that. Through understanding color psychology, to choosing the right fonts for your brand, to choosing photos that build better brand affinity. These are all pieces that when someone lands on your website, boom, they know what you're about and they know how they feel in that moment.

So again, this is important because choosing colors, choosing fonts, choosing photos, and choosing elements can feel really overwhelming. In fact, many of you are probably sitting in that right now where you'll pick out a bunch of colors and then two days later, you're like, “Oh, actually I want this color instead.” And you're spinning your wheels for a really long time.

But all of those pieces are rooted in emotion and when you start with the emotional piece first, then you can choose your branding aesthetics.

Conclusion

So this is the six-part framework that I teach my clients called the Build a Better Brand Method.

Think of it as building a new building. In order to add stories and increase the height of the building, you need to take the time to construct a solid foundation. If you don't, the building will not stand.

The same is true for your business. If you do not have a solid foundation, you're going to notice you can't go very high. Things start to crumble. Things start to slip. Things won’t fit and you’ll always feel like something is missing.

So now you know. This is the brand roadmap in this exact order. Now, you should be able to look at this and identify what you’re missing or where you need to start.

You know I'm all about the action so make sure you sign up for the Build a Better Brand Method.

This might have been a small sample of that free training, but there’s more in-depth information on storytelling, ideal customer and messaging within the class.

This is a free on-demand training teaching you how to completely elevate your brand and business. You can learn more at betterbrandmethod.com.