5 Secrets To Start Building Your Brand Personality In 2022

One of the very first things that you need to take into account when establishing a strong search engine optimization (SEO) or digital marketing plan is to determine what your brand is all about. When building your brand online, the most important thing you need to make sure of is to have a unique personality that sets you apart from all the rest.

Imagine being at a party full of people. Generally, physically attractive people are the ones that easily grab others’ attention. However, individuals with the most charming and interesting personalities are the ones that really get people to engage with them.

This is just one of the proofs that personality does win.

What is brand personality? Why is it important?

Think of your brand as a living entity with personality and values. While beauty and aesthetics catch the attention, it’s the personality that draws people to you. The same is true for your brand. A brand with a great personality will have more people who will want to connect with them.

Needless to say, brand personality refers to the human traits attached to a business name. It’s your brand’s unique identity that allows your business to express itself. Whether you decide to make your brand creative, fun, stylish, cool, or environmentally conscious, it’s those human qualities that tell consumers how your brand talks and behaves.

Remember, people usually base their feelings on a person’s personality. So, if you want your target audience to feel comfortable reaching out to you and engaging with you, you need to make sure that you choose the perfect personality for your brand.

How to choose the best brand personality?

In a competitive landscape, such as the internet, you can expect to find a myriad of brands with similar personalities. When choosing a brand personality, you shouldn’t play it safe. You don’t want a brand personality that bores your audience or only makes you blend in with the others.

To succeed with your brand personality, you need to choose the traits that will make your enterprise stand out. That will make your audience want to engage with you every time they come across anything that’s associated with your brand, be it your logo, slogan, or social media account.

In other words, you want to choose a brand personality that makes you different – a spotted zebra, a short-snouted elephant, a curly-haired lion, or a three-tailed monkey, perhaps.

More than being a standout – more than being different from all the rest – your brand must be infused with an attractive, highly engaging personality that makes it hard for your audience to resist engaging with you. You shouldn’t fear being different. That is exactly what you should want for your brand – to be not like your peers.

The brand personality framework

The brand personality framework is composed of five distinct dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. They were first defined by branding and marketing expert Jennifer Aaker in an article entitled The Journal of Marketing Research.

When deciding where your own brand should fall on the brand personality spectrum, you need to identify your the personality traits that are aligned with your core values and brand compass.

• Sincerity (Honest, wholesome, down-to-earth, cheerful)

Brands with such defining traits are typically from the foodservice, safety, and hospitality industries.

• Excitement (Daring, up-to-date, imaginative, spirited)

Brands that choose excitement are usually those that target the young demographics. These companies usually use cool celebrity or influencer endorsements and thrilling gimmicks.

• Competence (Reliable, successful, intelligent)

Companies that choose this brand personality are confident and responsible thought-leaders that easily gain people’s trust. These include financial, healthcare, logistics, and insurance companies, to name a few.

• Sophistication (Charming, upper-class)

Sophisticated brands are charming, refined, and luxurious, which target status-conscious buyers. Brands that fall in this personality are from the fashion, automotive, and luxury industries.

• Ruggedness (Tough, outdoorsy)

This personality is for companies that are built to last, hard-working, authentic, and strong. These could be companies from the sports, construction, and outdoors industries.

How to build your brand’s personality?

Keep in mind that one’s personality can make them likable or annoying, interesting or dull, encouraging or off-putting. The same goes for your brand. In other words, an effective brand personality gives your business a human face and human traits, making it more relatable to people.

1. Identify your target segments first

You need to know your target segments on a personal level for you to successfully build an effective brand personality. Know their opinions, interests, and traits to ensure that you’ll be able to align your brand personality with your audience’s preferences. This is the most important step toward brand-building to ensure that whatever messaging you create from hereon will resonate with your audiences.

2. Get consistent customer insights

Be where your target audience is, be it on social media platforms, online communities, or other networks where most of them hang out online. Engage with them and get a ton of value from their feedback, comments, and questions. Through this stream of insights, you’ll be able to gain a deeper understanding of who they are, where you can find them, and how best to engage with them.

3. Craft your moral code

Once you get valuable insights into your audience, the next important step you need to take is to align your moral code with your marketing campaigns. Studies show that consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that resonate with their beliefs. On top of that, more than 50% of consumers claim that they want brands to take a stance on social justice issues that they care about. You need to be very careful when choosing advocacy because consumers can tell what’s real from what’s not. You must be 100% for it if you’re to take a stance on social issues.

4. Put a human face behind your brand

Your company’s CEO, founder, or any person with a high-ranking position should be active on your social media platforms. This is to put a human face behind your brand, making it more approachable, more authentic. Furthermore, it helps your audience to easily associate content with a face, which can make you an authority in your niche.

5. Find out where you must share

The importance of knowing where exactly to share content is to ensure that your target audiences will be there to consume it. This means that you must only use the platforms where there is a huge possibility of your content being shared and reshared multiple times. For example, if you’re a clothes retailer, it would only make sense to share Facebook, TikTok and Instagram posts because these are the usual places where young people frequent.

Conclusion

The most important thing to keep in mind when building your brand’s personality is to align with your customer’s preferences. Your audience should always come first. They should be the first thing on your mind when deciding on digital marketing or search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to increase brand visibility online.