I work with founders and CEOs from around the world helping them build a unique and powerful personal brand through my personal brand agency. When we started our work together, one of the first questions I asked them was, “Why?” I wonder why they build a personal brand, which — while exciting at times — is still time consuming and sometimes mentally taxing. The replies I get vary in specificity and length, but they can all be grouped into three main categories. What a personal brand gives you in the end is visibility, portability and platform.

Visibility

The goal of personal branding is for you to position yourself as an expert, thought leader, or influencer in the minds of your target audience. When you market yourself, your audience size grows, giving you visibility as a result. Depending on your goals, visibility can serve a variety of purposes, helping you attract clients, career opportunities, desired promotions (sometimes, internal visibility is as valuable as external visibility) and opportunities you may never have thought about or intended to attract.

Of course there is a downside to higher visibility and that is something our clients often worry about. With a surge in the number of people interested in your brand, there will likely be an increase in the number of people who not only dislike you but also make sure to let you know about it. We most often refer to them as “haters” or as “keyboard worryers,” but no matter what you call them, the daggers they throw tend to bruise.

Recently, our client shared a heartwarming post on LinkedIn supporting a Canadian Olympic athlete who has received a lot of criticism. The post went viral, was viewed by nearly two million people and generated engagement among thousands.

The outpouring of love towards the heroes of the post — and our clients as storytellers — is just incredible. Yet even among all the love and support, some choose to go through the dagger: fact-checking, criticizing and sometimes just letting go of their negativity. Our clients take heart, respond to every comment and stay true to the brand of caring and thoughtful individuals, believing that even “haters” deserve respect.

Often, the downside of visibility is what stops people from putting themselves out there. To that end, we remind them that “haters” may stand out when you care about public opinion, but in reality, they really are few and far between. Most of us out there support, encourage, or keep scrolling when we disagree.

Related: 3 Ways to Identify Your Company’s Unique Marketing Corner

Portability

Your brand gives you equity. Your brand builds personal brand equity over time and that equity gives you portability. Whether we are employed by organizations or self-employed, our path is not linear. Life throws us a ball of curves and we spin more than we could ever hope to. A personal brand gives you portability, whether you need it for a career transition or after exiting as an entrepreneur.

And this is where most people make personal branding mistakes. Most people believe that building a personal brand means creating content about their area of ​​expertise, and that is a mistake. A true personal brand needs to be built around who you are, not what to do. This and only this will provide portability.

If you build your brand around the essence of who you are (your unique characteristics, your core values, your beliefs, your personality and what you stand for), your brand will not and should not change as you pivot. You see, what you do is important because it will help position your expertise, but it’s not your brand. Rather, it is one of your talking points.

Let me give you an example. The personal branding concept we developed for one of our clients is “circularity entrepreneur.” Our client is a business coach today, but who he really is can be described as a strong believer in the importance of incorporating the 3 P’s in our business operations: people, profit, planet.

He is a businessman who dreams of leaving the world a better place for his daughter. He is passionate about the circular economy and believes that the concept can be applied beyond the world of manufacturing and extended to any business. Currently, he is a business coach and one of the pillars of his content is his method of improvement. His brand, however, is built around circularity, which is who he is.

Related: 10 Reasons Why Your Brand Should Be Online in 2022

Platforms

The reason I founded my personal branding agency and the reason I am so passionate about personal branding is quite simple: I want to help amplify the voices that matter, the voices that need to be heard, the voices that can influence, inspire and make the world a better place. . What you do with your platform is up to you, but owning it takes you straight to the top of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs: It allows you to achieve self-actualization, inspire others, and make a difference.

Personal brands are increasingly associated with photocopies, vacation photos, and social media bragging. In reality, personal branding is about visibility that allows you to attract meaningful opportunities, portability that protects you in times of crisis or change, and platforms that allow you to live a meaningful life.

Related: What Theranos Story Teaches Us About The Dark Side of Personal Branding