How to build a disgustingly powerful personal brand in 2027

0:00More than social media

Your personal brand is so much more than how you show up on social media. In fact, as a professional anything, you need more than just a personal brand. You need a professional brand. And I’m gonna show you exactly how you can start building your personal professional brand today, even without thinking about social media. Although, obviously, getting that brand in front of the world does involve posting on socials. So we’re gonna look at what a magnetic professional brand actually is, the three moves you can make to start building one today, and how you can start from where you are right now, no matter where you’re at with social media. But first, we need to define what a brand actually is. Personal brand is a hugely hot topic now, and for good reason. Everyone’s building one, and everyone who isn’t feels like they’re missing out. And 90% of the founders that I work with on their company brands ask me the same question, and it’s, “Can I build my business without building my personal brand as well?” What they don’t realize is that their personal brand is in everything that they do, and yours is, too. It’s not just simply about what you post on Instagram.

1:02What a brand actually is

So what is a brand? Over the last 70 years, so many marketing experts have defined what a brand actually means. It moved from what a company or person makes or does, then to what it offers to other people, and now it’s all about how you make people feel. That shift is why the definition of branding for business also applies to personal branding as well. And the greatest minds in branding and marketing have defined it in different ways. So David Ogilvy defined it as the intangible sum of a product’s attributes and the consumer’s idea of a product. It’s talking about qualities that you can’t see or touch. Marty Neumeier, a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company defined by individuals, not by the company. Again, it’s a feeling judged by your audience. You don’t get to define it, but you get to influence it and construct it through all of the micro-interactions with you with your brand. And finally, Seth Godin. He defined it as the expectations, memories, and stories and relationships that together explain why someone chooses you over alternatives. It’s what guides the choice of people when they are working with you, interacting with you, buying from you, whatever it is you want people to do when interacting with your personal brand. So ultimately, your goal is to get people to feel something, and you want them to feel the same thing no matter how and where they interact with you.

2:241. Own one thing

So let’s get into the three things that you can do to start building one today. So the first thing you need to do is own one thing. You don’t need to be great at everything, but you do need to be known for something. The question you need to unpack is: what do you want to be associated with when someone hears your name? And there’s two ways to find it. So the first is to ask, “What do people always come to me for?” This is your unfair advantage that you already know you have the skills and the knowledge to be known for. Try and pick an overarching idea and fill it with three or four subtopics beneath it. So for example, I’m a brand and growth strategist for ambitious companies, so my overarching topic is brand strategy. But I can break that down into subtopics. I talk about the mechanics behind building a brand. I talk about turning that into a tangible growth strategy with defined plans and targets. I talk about applying traditional branding principles to personal branding, and I talk about conversion optimization to turn branding into revenue. And then the second thing to ask yourself is, “What’s the most valuable thing that I love to share?” This is what you’re passionate about. And where those two things meet is where you really wanna be building your personal brand because if you don’t love talking about something, you don’t want to be known for it. So taking my example, I love digging into branding principles and buyer psychology and taking all of those principles and turning them into strategies that people can use today to make more money. And I’m obsessed with digging into that research, so everything I talk about aligns with what people come to me for and what I love talking about. And then finally, to layer over the top of that is asking yourself, “What is the most valuable thing I can talk about to grow my business?” If you’re not just building a personal brand for the sake of building a personal brand and you actually want to use it and leverage it to grow your business, then you also need to understand what are the most important things that you can and need to be talking about in order to do that, and make sure that that overlaps and syncs up with what people come to you for and what you’re passionate about. Now, what you should be able to see if you’ve stopped and answered these questions is an overlap between them, and there’s a really simple formula to define that overlap, and it’s action plus outcome or relationship we improve for audience through how we do it. So for example, someone building an app in the creator space might say, “Give creators back control of their creative work through organizational systems built by someone who has lived the chaos firsthand.” Or a fitness coach might say, “Build lifelong strength and confidence in people who’ve never stuck to the gym through coaching that fits the plan to the person, not the person to the plan.” And that is your mission statement with your personal brand, which takes us to point two.

5:042. Show up everywhere

Now you know what you’re gonna be talking about and what you want to be known for, you need to make sure that you’re not just talking about it online but showing up consistently everywhere within your brand. And that means how you interact with people offline as well because your brand doesn’t end when you come offline when you log off of Instagram. So audit yourself right now and ask, does your current behavior align with the mission statement that we just wrote? Does the mission that you’re working towards online line up with how you show up in person? This matters because if you want to be known for being trustworthy, you need to show up and be trustworthy in your everyday life. If you want to be known for leadership and teach people leadership online, you need to show up offline and be a good leader to your team, to the people around you, and show those qualities in every single thing that you do. So now it’s time for a little bit of self-truth to figure out where you’re leaving gaps and where you have opportunities to better show up online and offline. So it’s time to do a behavior audit. You can do this in a few minutes. It’s super simple, and all you need to do is note down every aspect of where you need to show up in your professional life. So you’ve got- Zoom meetings or in-person meetings, whether they’re internal or external. You’ve got in emails, in feedback you need to offer to people, in your social media content, in LinkedIn messages, during coffees, and then even outside of work. Is it after-work drinks? Is it the Christmas party? Whatever those things are for you that are relevant for how you need to show up, list those down. And note against each one how you are currently showing up and how you’re currently behaving, because understanding what you’re doing now is where- how we can understand the gaps and the opportunities to get you to where you’re bringing in that mission statement and filtering that through every single thing that you do. So be honest with yourself. It doesn’t matter what the answers are now, the point is that we take where we are, and we can move forward with it. A great tip here is to actually use Claude to help you. It’s really hard to be subjective when we’re looking at our own behavior, so what you can do is connect Claude to things like your emails, give it access to meeting recordings and so on, and have Claude analyze your behavior and how you’re showing up in things like your tone of voice. Ask it about cadence, about how you structure things, about recurring patterns in how you communicate, any outliers in your communication style when you’re communicating with a certain person or set of people. It’s going to quickly give you a bit of subjective feedback to get you started. And even better, if you have access to people who can give you and will give you subjective feedback on your interactions, go and ask them, because you’d be really surprised at the type of feedback people can give you.

7:523. Design micro-experiences

Now that we’ve done that self-reflection and we understand how we’re showing up right now, so we know where the gaps are within our communication style, within how we’re showing up in all of those areas, it’s time for point three, which is the absolute key for building a consistent personal brand. We’re gonna manufacture micro-experiences into all of our interactions. So every conversation, every touch point, every moment of interaction is an opportunity to introduce a micro-experience that reinforces and builds your brand. And those micro-experiences are tiny, repeatable moments that you can form into habits. So you need to put the work in to design these micro-experiences, understand how you can use them, where you can use them, but once you form that habit, they will start becoming natural, and it’s gonna mean that you’re gonna leave a consistent feeling no matter where you’re interacting, no matter if you’re online or offline. And that’s what branding is. That’s what we defined at the beginning. It’s the gut feeling that you leave people with. So let me give you an example of a micro-experience. I work on my clients’ positioning, and part of the work that I do involves really deep listening, really digging into their brands, because my clients need to be confident that I understand their vision and their goals for their business. So that means from the very first interaction with anyone, my highest priority is to listen, not talk. And it doesn’t matter if that person is a client or potential client, because even someone that I’m not working with might be a potential referral source. So that person also needs to think of me as a great listener and a great active listener during conversations because it’s something they know is gonna be important if they’re gonna refer me to someone to do this work. So I make sure that I use the summarizing technique in conversations. So I actively listen, I briefly summarize, and repeat back to make sure I’ve understood what they’ve said, and then I give my opinion. I don’t bulldoze the conversation with my opinions, and that’s how I’ve built that reputation of someone who does that, who listens and asks the right questions. Now, that was something that I had to work at in the beginning to create that experience. Now it comes naturally in a conversation because I formed that habit, and that’s exactly what you need to do.

10:12Micro-experience examples

So other examples of how you can create these micro-experiences would be building a habit of speaking up in group calls or meetings, practicing your elevator pitch or one-line summary of what you do and who for, for when you’re introducing yourself, so that you’re always putting your best foot forward, and you could use the mission statement we wrote at the beginning to feed into that. It might be checking in with your team or clients at the same time every week to build that consistency and be known as a, a trusted and great communicator. Even down to the way you dress is part of a micro-experience. For example, Steve Jobs was one of the first of the tech billionaires who super consistently was well known for wearing the exact same clothes every single day, and part of that was that whole idea of removing decisions that he doesn’t need to make so that he can focus on other things. But it’s also a brand and a micro-experience. Everyone pictures him in that outfit when they think of him, in his, like, black turtleneck and plain clothes. Now, I’m not saying you need to wear the same outfit every day, but everything like that is part of those experiences, and you need to think about the image and the person you wanna come across as. So your micro-experiences are gonna be completely different to mine. They’re gonna be different to Steve Jobs’ outfit-wearing habits. It’s gonna be completely different from your friend or other business owners and colleagues. So based on the audit in step two where you listed all of the places you need to show up, next to that, note down what is the micro-experience that you can create within each of those interactions to continue to build on your brand. And then keep those pinned somewhere that you can see so that you can start ingraining those in your mind to always do them, whether it’s putting them on your desktop, in a notes app, whatever works for you. I used to have sticky notes all over my computer screen to remind me to do certain things in meetings and things like that, and now they’re ingrained, and they’re just habits. I don’t need the sticky notes anymore.

12:08Build it in every interaction

Now, as founders and business owners, we put so much work into our business, and you deserve to have a personal brand that supports that, and it brings that trust and recognition and opportunities, but you need to build it. And creating that magnetic personal and professional brand is how you attract those things to you. The process we’ve just gone through is exactly how you can start building that today, not just on your social media, but in every single interaction that you have. So if you liked this video, please do like and subscribe, and if doing this behavior and brand audit opened a complete can of worms for you and you wanna dig deeper into defining your brand, then you need to check out this video of the nine essential questions you need to answer to build your brand.