Over the years, building resumes and curriculum vitae has become incredibly stressful in job search. For every position or job, you must brush up your resume to match the client’s needs. However, personal brands and a strong social media presence have changed the game for businesses and job seekers.

A personal brand is a combination of self-presentation strategies with marketing principles to create a unique identity that differentiates you from other brands in your industry. It is so important that 67% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with companies they recognize and those whose founders’ values align with theirs. Additionally, 80% of recruiters say personal branding is essential to their candidate evaluation process.

Despite the over-emphasized importance of personal branding, most women do not have an active personal brand. But that’s about to change. This article highlights why women need personal brands while detailing practical steps to help you build a winning personal brand. Let’s get started!

Why Female Enterpreneurs Need To Build Personal Brands

Establishing a strong personal brand empowers you to stand out, showcase your expertise, establish authority, build influence, and create growth opportunities.

1. Establishing Authority and Credibility

Your unique story shapes how people see you and your brand. When you consistently offer value and share helpful insights to your audience, they will see you as the trusted source for the particular problem you solve.

They become more interested in your brand (if you’re a founder), and if you are a freelancer, potential clients become warm leads because you have successfully used your content to nurture them. When they reach out, all you have to do is close the deal because they have interacted with your expertise through your brand.

2. Enhancing Career and Business Opportunities

A proper personal brand attracts new job opportunities, collaborators, and business offers and helps you connect with your audience on a deeper level. If you are a freelancer, you can relate to the endless back-and-forth of competing for a gig with countless other freelancers on job marketplaces.

Sometimes, these gigs are not worth the effort talents put into getting them. But you can not escape the feast and famine cycle if you don’t step back and reevaluate your strategies.  For instance, after a year of ghostwriting for various brands, I moved to LinkedIn to build a personal brand.

I wanted my work out there with my name on it, and freelance job boards weren’t cutting it. After sharing content for six weeks on LinkedIn, a potential client reached out, and I got a gig that covered the compensation for two months’ work. You see, a personal brand can boost your career prospects; it also helps in negotiating better salaries and promotions.

3. Using Your Personal Brand to Building Influence

Another importance of personal branding is having the influence to change your industry and society at large. By sharing your journey, challenges, and values, you can create relatable narratives that resonate with your target audience. From here, people begin to listen to you. They become interested in what you have to say. You can then use your influence to lend your voice to pressing societal issues.

4. Overcoming Gender Bias

Women leaders often face conflicting expectations around likability and authority. They still face stereotypes and systematic barriers in many industries, and to overcome this, you need a strong personal brand.

You can use your platform to help challenge these biases by highlighting women’s achievements, unique skills, and professional personas. So, aside from coming out of the “invisibility trap,” your core values will allow you to prioritize long-term goals over short-term approval, which can become a shield against gender-based bias.

Steps to Build a Powerful Personal Brand

To build a powerful personal brand, you must define your brand, be authentic, focus on growing your network, teach, and be consistent. Here is a breakdown of how to make it happen.

1. Define Your Brand

To build a strong personal brand, you need to be clear on who you are and what you stand for. You can’t give what you don’t have. So, before you can communicate anything to the world, you need to clarify yourself, know what you are aiming for, and know your strengths, your values, and the unique perspective you bring to the table.

It is not only about what you do but the deeper reason behind it: is it the impact you want to have, the space you want to occupy, or the legacy you want to leave behind. You have to understand everything about yourself so you don’t get lost along the line.

Moving on, defining your brand is not just about you but also about the people you want to connect with. Therefore, you need to know your target audience.

Trying to reach or serve everyone is a bad idea, but how do you identify your target audience or know what they want? First, you must know what they are looking for in a solution. One of the easiest ways to do this is to look at what established names/individuals in your industry offer and how they sell their offer.

You shouldn’t copy them, but conducting in-depth research on what they are doing and what is working and what isn’t, can help you build improved plans that will make your brand standout.

After researching, find out where your audience spends the most time (social media platforms). Once you figure this out, use these three proven pointers to connect with the right people.

• Connect with people in the same industry as you.
• Connect with people that can pay you (people that your solution is tailored for; could be businesses, founders, freelancers, marketing agencies, etc)
• Connect with executives in companies you want to collaborate with.

The goal is to have a network of professionals you can teach, learn from, make money from, or collaborate with on future projects. But you can’t do that successfully without understanding their needs, preferences, and expectations, so work on that first.

2. Be Authentic

Authenticity is essential in personal branding. Being authentic means being yourself, not copying others, and sticking to your values. People will trust you more when they see that you uphold your core beliefs and principles and are consistent with them.

They will also trust you if you offer helpful and actionable solutions, and do it as they professionally polished version of YOU and not anyone else. For instance, with the rise of Generative AI, many professionals now rely solely on these models to create content for their personal brands.

Now, Gen AI tools are incredibly helpful. Still, you need to infuse your unique voice into every communication with your audience if your personal brand is to resonate with the target audience. Aside from using Gen AI models, you should also teach your ghostwriter (if you’re using one) to communicate as you would and never stray from your values.

3. Grow Your Network (Your Network is Your Networth)

A strong network adds credibility to your personal brand. Your community will engage with your work, collaborate with you, and/or recommend you to prospective clients and business partners.

But, how do you build a network? You build a network through active participation in events, online platforms, and professional associations while nurturing existing relationships.

Some people get this wrong. Building your network is not about reaching out to people and shoving your offer down their throats. It is also not about sharing the best content. Great content and cold pitches alone cannot help you build your network, especially if you are just starting out in your personal branding efforts.

What then should you do? It’s simple. You see the three sets of people you connected with earlier? Well, you have to engage with their brand actively. To build a relationship with them, try to;

• meaningfully engage with their content,
• connect with them in the DMs after you have consistently shown up on their page (don’t pitch),
• Offer to help where you can.

Once you successfully build a good relationship with them, you can easily talk about your work, your products, and upcoming projects you’d need help with. Since you’ve built a meaningful connection with them and have probably being supportive in the past, they would be more than happy to help or recommend people in their network that can.

4. Teach to Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader

Thought leaders are people who have built themselves as experts and inspiring or prominent voices in a particular niche or industry. Thought leadership is about being helpful and authentic. The more you teach people, the more they learn to trust you.

Task yourself with not just sharing content but teaching and offering practical tips that solve real problems for your audience as quickly as possible. Whether you’re sharing written content or videos, hosting an X Space, or organizing a workshop, ensure your brand is helpful. 

When you make it all about your customers, they will make it all about you. Besides that, teaching your audience is a win-win situation. The more you teach, the more visibility you get, and the more fluid you become in storytelling and your work.

5. Be Consistent

If you are religious about any of the previous points but aren’t consistent, your personal brand will never be successful. Consistency ties your personal brand together. It differentiates you from other professionals in your industry and determines who gets seen and who doesn’t.

When you consistently show up, speak up, and serve your audience, you reinforce your identity, message, and credibility. It’s not enough to define your brand once and share content often, even when it seems like no one is watching. To be memorable, it is advisable to share content twice or once daily, depending on the platform, and connect with other professionals as often as possible.

As Nmasichi Founder of Belle Sisters said “…being an entrepreneur means showing up even when no one is watching. It means crying after a failed launch but still pulling yourself back up. It means feeling the pain and frustration of chasing your dreams while seeing no clear end in sight. But that’s exactly when you need to keep going. That’s when you push harder. Because if you stop, you’ll have to start over again.“

There are days you won’t feel like showing up, we’ve all been there and it is at this point that determining what consistency means for you becomes essential. Whether it showing up twice weekly, daily, or twice daily is left for you to decide. Stick to what works for you and as you gain more traction, you can re-evaluate your strategy and make the necessary improvements.

Final Thoughts

Building a strong personal brand as a woman is a journey that requires dedication, consistency, and authenticity. This journey can be challenging, so being a part of a community of dedicated female entrepreneurs, founders, freelancers, and business owners in various industries is advisable.

These communities help you connect with like-minded individuals who understand the challenges of the business landscape, help you stay accountable, and always have your back. If you are unsure where to start, join Belle Sisters, a community of like-minded women growing and winning together.