A personal brand is your professional identity. It’s not just your visual branding, such as fonts, colors and logos, that form it, but it’s also your reputation, how you show up, deal with clients, and present yourself—your personal brand impacts the way you are perceived by clients and other professionals in your field.
A good personal brand can help you stand out in a sea of freelancers and position you as the go-to expert in your field, which means you can charge more.
So, if you want to be a sought-after freelancer with a memorable personal brand, here are some tips to help you build it.
1. Highlight what makes you different
Before getting on to the visual side of branding, such as colors, fonts, and logos, first decide on how you want to be perceived by your ideal client, what you do and who you help.
What’s something that you do well or excel at that will make you stand out from others? What’s your unique value proposition? What’s in it for your ideal client? It doesn’t have to be anything complicated either; it could be that your competitors offer this, too, but you just highlight it differently.
For example, it could be something as simple yet extremely important as being known as the freelancer who always delivers work on time, the coach with a 100% success rate, the go-to freelancer when it comes to editing short videos for social media marketing campaigns, or you could have a niche and be the wedding planner for fairy tale style weddings.
Whatever it is you do, you want to stand out from the crowd, build trust and position yourself as an authority.
2. Establish a brand voice and personality
Now you’ve honed in on what makes you different and attractive to your ideal client, think about how you want your communications to sound. In other words, what’s your brand voice?
Is it fun and quirky, professional and friendly, high-end and sophisticated, or something else? Your brand voice and how you communicate your brand and values to the outside world will distinguish you from others and make you memorable.
Your brand voice should be consistent across all your communication channels, whether via your website, social media accounts, onboarding communications, or in-person comms such as meetings and conferences.
Your brand voice and personality increase your visibility, attract your ideal clients, and keep them engaged.
3. Brand all communications
Once you’ve established what you do, what makes you stand out, and who your ideal client is (see our article here) and have nailed your brand voice and personality, now you can think about visual identity such as your brand logo, fonts and colors.
Unless you are a professional graphic or logo designer, you may want to hire a professional to help you with this task. The color, font and logo can be effectively used to incorporate your brand values and even a visual depiction of your skill.
Your visual identity should then go on all communication touchpoints. It’s not just your SEO-optimized website that will include your visual branding, such as your logo, etc., but also all communications from social media channels to letterheads to your onboarding process to emails. And don’t forget to include your branding on your invoices.
Invoice Ninja is a leading free invoicing software for small business invoicing, online payments, tracking expenses and billable tasks. It also includes attractive, professional invoice template designs you can customize with your logo and brand colors.
You can email clients via Gmail, Microsoft accounts, or your own SMTP server and customize the email subject line and body text. It also has a branded client-side portal where your customers can view their invoice history, payments and quotes.
A 100% branded experience for your clients.
Try it for free here.
4. Use case studies and client testimonials
A good way to promote yourself as an authority in your field is by using social proof such as client testimonials and case studies. Case studies can be used to illustrate how you helped previous clients solve their problems and what steps you went through to make the transformation. These can then be published on your website as well as leveraged via sharing them on your social media channels.
Likewise, you can never have enough client testimonials, so make sure you ask for them (as well as client referrals) at the end of each project. Client testimonials can be posted on your website and again used as social proof by sharing them on social media.
Sharing client testimonials is a great way to boost your personal brand and increase trust, visibility and authenticity. It is even better if they are specific and talk about the problem, how you solved it and the resulting positive outcome.
And remember, testimonials don’t just have to be in written format – video testimonials are also highly effective.
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There are many ways to boost your personal brand and get your name and expertise out there.
These include, but are not limited to, leveraging social media, content marketing, podcasting, guest blog posts, and general networking, to name just a few. However, underpinning all these are the elements that make up your personal brand, such as your brand values, being reliable and consistent, being clear about who you help and how, and being known as an authority in your chosen field.