7 most important questions in personal branding

If you want to market your product successfully, you must KNOW the product and have a clear strategy and action plan. It is the same with personal branding.

If you want your personal brand work for you and help you to achieve your business goals, you need to have a strategy in place. You need a clearly defined goal, you need to analyse yourself thoroughly and map your strengths and weaknesses, interests, knowledge and skills. You also need to be clear about who you are – what your values, your passion, style and lifestyle are.

The identity development of a personal brand needs to be addressed systematically. Before you start, it is important to understand what your personal brand should and should not be. Both the brand of your company and of yourself must contain considerably more than just the visual side and well-planned marketing activities. The substance is the most important thing. So, it must first and foremost include your values, attitudes, beliefs, competencies, charisma, a clear purpose and a broader strategy. It must create a desired, yet authentic image of you. However, the most important thing is to know what exactly you want to achieve with your personal brand.

Your personal brand must answer the seven most important questions.

1. What is your goal?

It is important to think about what you want to achieve, where you want to get and what your goals are. If you don’t know these from the start, you’ll struggle with answering the following questions.

2. What is your personal brand DNA?

You need to map your strengths and weaknesses as well as your values, passion and lifestyle in general. It is your identity that will help you later to achieve that what will make you stand out and give your customers a reason to choose you when they make their purchasing decision.

3. What do you offer?

Just as positioning is the foundation of a company’s marketing activities, your personal brand strategy starts with what you offer. In thinking about this topic, you need to write down your knowledge and skills – both professional and those that you have learned in your daily life. Think about what motivates and inspires you. And think bigger and considerably bolder. This is one of the most important topics and defines exactly what makes you stand out. Think about all the strong personal brands that you know. Oprah, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson – they all have that “something” that is bigger than themselves – their unique story that sets them apart from everyone else. Everybody has their own story. You just have to find yours.

4. Who should know about you?

You must take sufficient time to answer this question. You need to define as precisely as possible your target group, or those customers or customer groups that need to know about you and your business. You need to analyse whether they are individuals or companies and dissect them to the smallest detail. If you skip answering this question or fail to do it in sufficient detail, you will be wasting your time and money in the future. If you don’t know who you need to focus your sales and marketing efforts on, you aim at everybody and don’t get anywhere.

5. What do they need to know about you?

This question covers your content strategy and the specific messages that you want your target group to understand. Your brand needs its own language and communication. In addition to content, you need to define your style and tone, as well as to think in detail about what content would help, appeal to and create value for your target group.

6. How will they get to know about you?

In answering this question, you need to compare different social media channels as well as traditional sales and marketing channels with the help of which your personal brand could reach a wider audience. You should choose the more specific channels that you should focus on, given your target group and content, and exclude those that don’t make sense to spend your money or time on.

7. How will you measure your success?

To understand how well your personal brand is working and to stay on the right course, you need to measure your activities. Measuring is difficult only in cases where it is not clear what results to measure or how to do it more accurately. We will also later give you more specific instructions on how, what, and how often to measure the success of your personal brand.