Lolu Mogaji

How much are you doing on a daily basis to reinforce your personal brand in the minds of your target audience? Building a personal brand in this time can prove to be an onerous task that requires specific and consistent activities. These activities must be worked into the daily life-styles of the bearers of the personal brands. In this blog post, I will highlight 5 points that I believe would help anyone who’s desires to build a personal brand, but does not know where and how to start. It is said that the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. The personal brand journey also starts with daily consistent steps in the right direction. Here are some steps to consider. Enjoy!
• Be purposeful about every day and live life deliberately: An effective personal brand is a product of carefully planned messages and activities, communicated and executed consistently on a daily basis. Therefore, it becomes imperative for the builder/bearer of a personal brand to draw up a daily map of what I call DPBGs (Daily Personal Branding Goals). These DPBGs can be broken down into activities called PBDs (Personal Brand Deliverables), these are little goals that must be achieved on a daily basis.
Example: If you are out to build your personal brand online, and you have a blog that you use as a platform to communicate and promote you personal brand, then a DPBG might be to gather relevant materials daily for the articles you would be posting on your blog, or that you would be posting something on your blog on a daily basis. Another example could be that you would engage in a particular activity or a set of activities daily. These activities are as varied as there are personal brands, so it is left to you to map out your own strategy and follow it through.
• Make your DPBGs top priority, and be faithful in ensuring that you attend to them daily. In the world of branding generally, the keyword is consistency, once it is taken out, then branding process is as good as truncated. Therefore inn order to secure the branding process, the bearer of the personal brand must ensure that his or her DPBGs are at the top of the priority list and must remain there. To put it differently, if you are truly serious about building a strong brand, then some of your DPBGs should form your personal culture. Let them always be on your “To do list”.
• Listen for comments, feedback: There’s a lot you can learn from your target audience, particularly on how your personal brand comes across to them, it’s only from them you can really know if your brand is doing well or not. The only way you can know how your brand is being perceived is if you listen to the audience you have decided to communicate it to. According to Richie Dayo Johnson, “feedback is the breakfast of champions”. If you don’t form a habit of soliciting for feedback, you may be operating in the realm of self deception, this is because you personal brand will stand a strong chance of survival if you have access to honest and objective feedback, particularly from target audience. Questions like: what are the changes you have noticed about me, my services, my style, etc? Would definitely draw out some quality feedback from your audience, this would give you an understanding of the health of your personal brand, and also some insight into areas that require attention.
• Review and analyze findings: Critically look at your findings, carefully pick things that need attention, and get back to the drawing board, because personal branding is a daily thing and tomorrow is another day.