Building a strong personal brand is essential for standing out and demonstrating your unique value, regardless of whether you are a professional, business leader, or entrepreneur. A well-constructed personal brand can assist you in obtaining employment, advancing within your company, and even attracting investors or partners for your business. But personal branding is rarely a one-time effort. You must regularly evaluate your brand to ensure it aligns with your goals and successfully communicates your differentiators. A personal brand audit helps with that. What a personal brand audit is, why it’s important, and how to do one well are all covered in this article.
What Is an Audit of My Personal Brand?
A personal brand audit is a way to assess how effectively your current brand communicates your personal value proposition to your target audience—regardless of who that audience may be. It serves as a foundational step in defining and enhancing your brand.
Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Personal Branding, says, “This is a systematic assessment of your brand as it exists now, to determine how well or poorly your current brand supports your vision and sense of self.” “It’s about evaluating the foundation upon which you can continue to build and refine your personal brand.”
A personal brand audit aims to better understand how your target audience, as well as other people, see you. If your audit reveals that your brand doesn’t align with your value proposition or miscommunicates your brand story, you can adjust it. You can concentrate on other areas of professional development instead if it demonstrates that your brand aligns well. Either way, a personal brand audit offers valuable insight into what’s working, what isn’t, and where there’s room for improvement.
Process of Personal Brand Audit It is essential to ascertain your current standing before making any changes to your personal brand.
Use the five steps below to conduct a personal brand audit that can help refine and strengthen your brand:
1. Take Stock of Your Brand Equity
Your personal brand is built on top of your brand equity. It includes all the assets already in place to support how your brand is currently perceived. Taking stock of your brand equity is the first step in auditing your personal brand. Your brand changes over the course of your career, as Avery discusses in Personal Branding. Start by gathering additional source material that reflects how other people perceive and interpret your brand in order to effectively evaluate it. As part of this step, Avery outlines brand equity’s five dimensions that likely already shape your personal brand. You can gain a deeper comprehension of the fundamental components of how others perceive you by evaluating each: Credentials include your personal and professional experience, as well as your education, degrees, certifications, licenses, and awards. Social capital refers to the relationships and networks you have within an organization or group, as well as the endorsements and recommendations you receive from those connections.
Cultural capital: The values, interests, and cultural ties shaped by your upbringing, cultural background, and life experiences.
Physical capital: The physical attributes by which others identify you, such as your visual identity, body language, and style.
Personality: Your unique qualities, tendencies, strengths, flaws, and emotional intelligence For each category, aim to identify three to five attributes that represent you. This self-evaluation can help you see clearly what is currently enhancing your brand and where you might want to grow.
2. Clarify and Refine Core Attributes
With your brand equity inventory completed, it’s time to identify the key attributes that make you distinct. Start by listing at least 10 adjectives you’d use to describe yourself, making sure they reflect:
- Your brand equity (Step one)
- Your purpose, objectives, and values Your personal value proposition
- Next, reflect on the story these attributes allow you to tell
Which ones align with the narrative you want your personal brand to convey? You can refine your list by:
Removing traits that don’t support your brand story
Utilizing stronger descriptors such as “compassionate leader” as an alternative to “compassionate” and “leader” Your objective is to reduce your list to three distinctive descriptors that convey who you are and what you can offer your intended audience. Don’t be afraid to tailor these descriptors to each audience if you have more than one, like current coworkers and potential employers.
3. Examine Public Opinion
Once you’ve defined how you want to be perceived, you must assess how others currently see you. One way to make this assessment, as highlighted in Personal Branding, is to conduct an online search of your name to see what results are returned. In addition to supporting your brand audit, this allows you to uncover what others, like prospective employers or clients, might find when they search for you online.
Tip: If you have a common name, try adding qualifiers such as your job title, location, or organization to narrow the results.
The quality of your digital footprint will have an impact on the results of your search. For some professionals, there may not be many results; others may uncover a variety of online content, including:
- Profiles on professional and personal social media Awards or honors you’ve received
- News articles or content you’ve been quoted in
- Publications, presentations, events, or speaking engagements
- You’ve created images, videos, or audio clips
After reviewing the results, identify at least three positive brand signals—evidence that reinforces your personal value proposition and brand story. These are strengths you can continue to showcase and reinforce across your personal brand.
At the same time, monitor for negative brand signals that detract from your desired brand story and consider ways to minimize them.
4. Seek Candid Feedback from Trusted “Truthtellers”
Validate your assumptions with feedback from the real world after you have identified traits that you believe reflect your personal brand. Reach out to individuals whose opinion you trust, whether current or former colleagues, friends, or family members. Your “truthtellers” are these. According to Rachel Greenwald, a professional matchmaker, dating coach, and executive fellow at HBS, truthtellers help you uncover other people’s perspectives on your brand, often in ways you may not realize.
In Personal Branding, Greenwald advises, “Ask somebody on a scale of one to ten to rate you on a certain quality.” “So, if you think, for instance, that you are an innovator, and that is going to be one of the characteristics of your personal brand, you could ask your truthteller, “On a scale of one to ten, how innovative do you think I am?” “That’s why you could do this,” Once you receive a rating, follow up by asking what it would take to improve by one point. The answer can offer valuable insight into how you’re currently perceived and what small changes could help shift that perception.
Consider asking open-ended questions in addition to this rating method to obtain more in-depth information, such as:
- Which of these characteristics best sums me up?
- Is there something that’s holding me back professionally?
- What kind of adjectives would you use to describe someone new to me?
As you evaluate your personal brand for effectiveness, accuracy, and clarity, feedback like this from people you trust can be extremely helpful.
5. Analyze for Alignment and Action
Now that you have all of the information listed above, it is time to begin analyzing your brand to find out what story it is currently telling and whether it is in line with what you want to tell.
As a guide for your analysis, ask yourself the following questions:
- What themes or patterns appear consistently across the feedback?
- Do these help or hinder my brand?
- Where do contradictions exist between how I want to be viewed and how others perceive me?
- What is missing from the story of my brand?
- Which voids must I fill, whether in my offline or online presence?
- Does my personal brand effectively set me apart from the competition?
- If not, which characteristics should I concentrate on as differentiation points?
- How can I address or reframe the situation if others have a negative perception of my brand?
It is essential to be sincere with oneself regarding the effectiveness of your brand at the moment and the ways in which it can be enhanced. After all, that’s the point of conducting an audit.
Just One Piece of Your Broader Brand Strategy
Conducting an audit is a critical part of defining and communicating your personal brand. But it’s just one piece of a larger, ongoing personal brand strategy. Embodiment, narrative, socialization, renegotiation, and visioning are additional crucial steps, each of which comes with its own procedures and difficulties. While it’s possible to define your personal brand on your own, taking that route might mean making a few mistakes along the way. If you want to avoid this trial and error, it can be helpful to enroll in an online course that walks you through the process.