Your personal brand must be communicated effectively.

Remember what a brand is not: It is not an opportunity to show off, brag, or belittle others. Nor is the desired outcome to give you an ego boost. Instead, it is a deliberate and ongoing cultivation of your personal image, with reference to clearly defined and communicated values and vision.

Building a personal brand requires an understanding of your presentation and communication style so that the narrative you craft will best play to your strengths. Your personal brand is your story. To be effective, it must be engaging and captivating, and compelling enough that people want to learn more about you, to follow you, and to share in your success.

Use this guide to analyse and improve your personal brand activity.

Craft and clarify your professional narrative

Your personal brand message must be strong, consistent, and authentic. Authenticity is key to who we are in business, and a brand built around this will be highly effective.

Aligning your online presence with your real personality, values, and beliefs is a way to build authenticity. Sticking to this tone of voice – and speaking on the same topics – is a way to create consistency. Both things will strengthen your brand immeasurably.

Create your highly compelling elevator pitch

This pitch is a short version of your career narrative. Punchy enough to be compelling and inviting, and intriguing enough to encourage further questions without sounding cheesy.

Crafting the perfect pitch is a delicate task, but the rewards are massive. Not only is it a hook to capture people’s interest – it’s a way for you to refine your ideas, your goals, and your vision. Being able to recite your elevator pitch relies on believing in it confidently.

Analyse and optimise your online presence

With a brand, you are memorable for the reasons you want to be. In an increasingly digital world, the way you interface with people on digital platforms and social media needs to be just as refined and polished as in real life.

These days, “content” is a broad net. You can write blog posts and magazine articles, sure, but you can also upload videos of keynote speeches to Vimeo or serialise your years of experience as an industry podcast. You can give people an insight into your life “behind closed doors” with an Instagram feed, just as quickly as you can involve yourself in as many industry conversations as you like via Twitter.

Using the right media to demonstrate your clout, and remaining active in relevant conversations, is a great way to develop, refine, and showcase new ideas, while also strengthening your personal brand.

Building a personal brand will help you to position yourself within an industry. It will change how people perceive you, and you have a lot of influence on how your brand will look. By understanding what a personal brand is, and the tools available to you for building one, you can maximise the likelihood of success. A brand will build by itself over time, so you might as well try to curate it in a way that is favourable to your passion, goals, and vision.

This reputation will carry out into the real world and will bring you tons of professional benefits.