Recently I have been talking to many influencers. The problem they are facing is engagement. After looking at their insights, mostly girls have around 80% of men followers, and boys too have the same. The question is if you are promoting a lipstick and mostly with such a follower ratio, is it really going to work? No, not at all.
Then how do we solve this? How do we have good and active followers accept our content and thus helping the brand to reach its goal? The influencers who crack this will always have campaigns in their hand.
What secret do these people know, which you don’t? The secret is we don’t create our personal brand. Many people think posting regular content will get them engaged. It will not work.
To make this work, you need to understand the importance of personal branding.
This may sound a very complex term, but it is very simple. Its how you promote yourself.
It makes you stand out in the crowd to our audience. Personal branding is your way of communicating with the world about who you are, what you stand for, your experiences, your skills.
Let’s see how can you create your own Brand.
Before creating personal branding, let us understand what is a brand?
It started thousands of years ago when people started to engrave their names, marks on goods to identify as their own. Greeks derived mark/marking for engraved symbols which we can find on ceramics and Old Norse derived brand/branding for burnt in symbols which could be found on animals. The brand took over the use of the mark and its usage increase notably.
The brand is all the names, messages, identity marks, phrases you want to communicate to your audience.
“Branding is endowing products and services with the power of a brand” (Kotler & Keller, 2015)
It’s giving a meaning to your brand.
Let’s see how you can apply this to your brand.
What goes into building a personal brand?
As an influencer, you are the brand. Now we have to see how it’s branding?
- Finding a niche
To build your own strong brand you will have you find what you really love to do. You need to be very authentic to your content. Many successful influencers have spent years figuring out at what they are good at before starting to create their content.
If you start creating the content just for the sake of it, your audience will see through it. You need to love what you do.
Brands are looking out for influencers who are authentic to their content.
Being open and honest is the only way to build your personal brand.
- Creating Relatable content
It is very essential to create relatable content to have authentic followers. You as a content creator should add value to your followers/people. So the content needs to be useful, inspiring can be entertaining, and should be relatable. People like to see your content only if it’s aspirational or relatable.
- Defining your brand values
Brand values are the beliefs, the brand stands for.
Think about Apple. What are the words that come to your mind?
- innovation
- think different
- change
- cool products
And it’s not by accident that we think these things. These have been very well communicated to us.
As a content creator, you will have to have belief and see that you are working with aligns with these beliefs. This helps your followers to trust you.
As an influencer, you will have to stick to these principles to achieve your long term goals. An influencer is built on trust, with followers trusting you to give them genuine recommendations on products and services you use and believe in.