NWC’s 4 Key Steps to Personal Brand Building: A quest for clarity
Ever wondered what’s involved in working with an advisor to build your personal brand? Here, I outline the 4 stages of personal brand building that I have developed over many years working with clients in business and professional spaces. They form NWC’s core approach to personal branding, adapted for individuals and teams.
Essentially – it’s a quest for CLARITY… because this leads to communicating with confidence and impact.
Key Step 1. Goals Clarity.
Before you can work on building a powerful personal brand, you have to know why you are doing it. Some clients come with very clear goals they want to achieve; others require some foundational work to find this clarity. This can include looking at career choices, business ideas, passions, sense of purpose and prioritised values. In my book, The Powerful Personal Brand, I spend a fair bit of time on these foundational aspects before getting into branding – you can find some great exercises to get goals clarity there.
Key Step 2. Positioning Clarity.
I have always been very strong on approaching personal branding in the same strategic way you would a business brand – if done well, any ‘brand’ is not about logos and fonts – a brand is essentially a set of messages, to a specific audience, about ‘why you’.
Getting clear on the core message of what you want to say is the next non-negotiable step. This is the part that most people find the hardest to achieve on their own – because it’s hard to move a vague bunch of ideas in your own head through to a very clear statement that works for others! My process for doing this has been fine-tuned over time, and necessitates some reflection work from the client, then a collaborative creative session involving guided discussion to tease out key points and form a clear picture of how you want to be seen, what makes you different and what makes your work so valuable to others.
Key Step 3. Strategic Clarity.
Now we have clarity on your goals and your personal brand’s key messages, how will we make your positioning visible to your target audience so that you can achieve what you intend to achieve? How will we grow your brand over time and ensure it’s influential?
Personal Brand Communication Strategy varies for different people, because it is firmly based in your goals, positioning and audience. Typically though, it will involve a strong thought leadership strategy and a network-building strategy.
Key Step 4. Implementation Clarity & Living it Out.
The best plans are useless if they’re not executed well. This is another common stumbling block, as clients return to their busy lives and their new-found clarity can be forgotten, or at least not shared with others. Step 4 is as important as the preceding steps because it brings your personal brand plan to life.
In this stage we gain clarity on what implementation of brand-building and communication will look like month by month, week by week. What are the small steps that, when put together, build something great?
For some, executing well will mean gaining outside support for certain tasks, such as building a website or creating content consistently. For others, a little training is needed on how to communicate with impact in certain ways, such as in keynote speaking or networking.
Finally, everyone building a personal brand has to consider what it will take for them to truly embody their new message with confidence. A lot of the confidence in your personal brand comes from the clarity achieved in the first three stages, because it feels authentically aligned – it stretches you to see the best in yourself, but it also ‘feels true’. For some people though, a little extra attention to self-development and daily confidence-building practices can really help to step into that powerful ‘best you’.
What is the very first step?
The first step is a discussion with me to see if we are a good fit working together. In this discussion, we already start to address Key Step 1: Goals Clarity! I also clarify packages and what you get from each one. To book a 15-minute initial discussion, simply send us an enquiry.
Related material
What is Personal Brand Positioning?
FAQs on our Personal Brand work