You may think that your personal brand is all set, but there’s always room for improvement when it comes to marketing and branding.

We’ve talked about common mistakes you can make with your personal brand in a previous blog. Forgetting your story is the number one mistake you can make in building your personal brand. Your business journey should be the focal point of your branding initiatives, and it’s central to building the values and key messages that you want to share with your audience.

At the same time, you can’t focus too much on your credentials, or else your messaging can come across as arrogant or self-centred. There are other ways to demonstrate your credibility, such as sharing valuable industry insights that can help your audience address their pain points.

These are just some of the mistakes that we’ve addressed in our previous blog, and the majority of them are rooted in a skewed perception of how personal branding works. Once you have a clear understanding of how to approach your personal brand, it’s much easier to avoid these mistakes.

However, as you continue levelling up your personal branding, you may have implemented strategies that are missing the mark in achieving your goals, even if the intent was to help your brand grow. This blog will help you identify how you’re missing the mark with your personal branding and ways you can remedy it.

5 ways you’re missing the mark with your personal brand

We’ve shortlisted five areas of improvement that you can address in your personal branding.

1. Generalising your audience base

If you try to please everyone, you please no one.

Casting a too-wide net for your audience base can make it challenging to convert your audiences into loyal customers. It’s more effective to create a niche target audience and reach a few people who fit your ideal customer’s profile than to reach a wide audience who don’t resonate with your brand. 

When you create your content and promote your personal brand, you need to make sure that you have a clear target customer in mind. You can reach your niche target audience by:

• Post to your website – Optimising your SEO and using the appropriate keywords will attract visitors to your website and encourage them to interact with your online content.
• Curate your social media profile – People actively use their social media pages to interact with their social circles and their favourite brands or personalities. Curating your content on social media ensures that your personal branding shines through, which will help attract your ideal audience.
• Launch a content marketing campaign – Your marketing initiatives increase brand visibility and awareness and help you attract your target audience and potentially convert them into customers.

2. Lacking a consistent key message

Inconsistent messaging can harm your branding efforts. This can dilute your brand message and even confuse your target audience. 

Here are three signs that you have inconsistent messaging for your personal brand:

• Conflicting visual identity – Your visual aesthetics is a crucial element of your personal brand. This consists of your logo, chosen fonts and colour palettes. Discrepancies in your aesthetics can result in a disjointed visual identity, which can lead to a bad impression from your target audience.
• Changing messages and promises – If you’re frequently changing your brand’s core messaging, values and promises, you will undermine your customer’s trust. 
• Contradicting marketing campaigns – If the messages of your campaigns directly oppose each other, it can confuse your customers and even decrease your credibility.

Having inconsistent messaging with your branding can be divisive with your audience. One segment of your audience may think that your branding is serious, dry and professional, but another segment may have only seen the silly and humorous side of your brand personality. 

You need to develop strategies to maintain consistency with your key messages and marketing efforts.

3. Overlooking your existing social circles

It’s good to have a clear buyer persona and target audience, but make sure you leverage your existing social circles. Your family, friends and even peers can be good starting points for building your audience base — all of whom you can engage through social media.

You can leverage your social media to your social networks and beyond by:

• Promoting content through different channels – While your website should be the primary jumping point for posting your content, you also need to share it with your target audience on your social media platforms. This will increase your visibility and reach online, potentially expanding your audience base.
• Maintaining high engagement – You need to keep the momentum going once your audience starts engaging with you and your content. Be proactive in responding to messages, inquiries and comments.
• Nurturing your leads – The development of social media platforms today has made it easier to provide a mix of content that addresses customers at different stages of their buying journey.

When you develop a loyal customer base within your existing social circles, you gain brand advocates who can help you spread the word about your personal brand and what you can do for your customers.

4. Creating self-indulgent content

Don’t mistake personal branding for self-promotion. Self-indulgent content dilutes the core messaging of your brand and reduces the effectiveness of your official marketing initiatives. 

Your audience doesn’t need or want to see another selfie from you. Instead, you can create memorable and valuable content for your audience. Short-form videos disseminate information quickly while entertaining your audience, while long-form blogs provide in-depth and comprehensive details about a specific topic from your industry. 

5. Blindly following trends

It’s tempting to jump on the bandwagon and create content based on viral trends on social media. 

According to Effectiviology, the bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to think or act a certain way if they believe that others are doing the same. For example, if you decided to boycott using memes on your social media page, other individuals in your social circle might decide to do the same.

Relying on trends by jumping on the bandwagon and following what’s popular may attract new audiences for a while. But how do you guarantee they will stay for the long haul if they aren’t your target customer in the first place? 

It’s important to think critically about each incoming social media trend and be strategic about which ones are actually beneficial for your personal branding. You must consistently monitor and track the performance of your personal branding initiatives. This enables you to identify areas of improvement and quickly address them. 

Do you need a fresh (and expert) pair of eyes over your personal branding strategy? Contact us and we’ll take a look.