7 Tips for Creating a Compelling Personal Brand Identity

At various points in your career, it can feel like a real struggle to get clarity on who you are and how to market your skills or products.

Whether you’re building a brand or figuring out ways to uplevel yourself in your corporate career, the keys to building “your brand” fall into the same framework.

After spending countless hours with clients figuring out ways to help them show up as their best selves, I’ve created a simple framework to help you create a clearer vision too.

This way you can feel less overwhelmed and more confident when sharing your work with the world.

Here are my seven tips, as they pertain to each of these categories:

1. Vision

Your vision statement paints a picture of what you seek to become and communicates the future manifestation of your work.

Your vision statement should also give people an idea of how your brand can affect them.

Here are some questions to think about to craft your own vision statement:

⭐️ Why are your products or services so important?

⭐️ Where are you going moving forward?

⭐️ What do you want to achieve in the future?

⭐️ What kind of future society do you envision?

2. Mission

What is your brand’s purpose for existing?

A clear mission statement describes your present activities, what you aim to achieve, how you will achieve it, and the benefits it provides.

🧮 Here’s the basic formula to create a mission statement:

What do you do +

Who do you do it for +

How do you do it +

What impact does this achieve?

Here are some examples of Vision and Mission Statements of some well-known brands:

1. LinkedIn

Vision: “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.”

Mission: "Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful."

2. IKEA

Vision: “To create a better everyday life for many people.”

Mission: "Offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them."

3. Tesla

Vision: “To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.”

Mission: "To prove that people don’t need to compromise to drive electric – that electric vehicles can be better, quicker, and more fun to drive than gasoline cars."

Here is my brand’s Vision and Mission Statement:

Vision: “Creativity and fulfillment are every human’s birthright.”

Mission: “To help individuals align with their inner truth, so they can share their unique gifts and be a source of inspiration for others.”

3. Values

By identifying what you desire most in your work life and what you stand for, it’s much easier to live in alignment when making big decisions.

Here you can choose 3-5 words that represent your core brand/career values.

Your core values can change over time, so this is work that you can revisit as your brand/career evolves over time.

Be sure to check out this guide that I’ve created to make it even easier to get clear on your Career Values!

And my Brand Values? Integrity, Creativity, Adventure, and Well-Being

4. Pillars 

Pillars are characteristics and foundational strategies that make your brand unique.

For example, brand pillars can be principles, methods, or defining aspects of your brand that add dimension and help you stand out from others.

What would your target customer or employer find important about you that would help them identify and differentiate it from your competitors?

Pillars are the main support for the structure of your brand and hold everything together above the foundation. Understanding your brand pillars will help you communicate what makes your brand special.

List your top 4-5 Brand Pillars in each category:

Purpose - What do you want to accomplish or what is the main value that you offer with the work you do? What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Perception - How do you come across to your target audience or employer?

Positioning - Why would someone want to choose to work with you over anyone else and how do you stand out?

Personality - What is the mood, voice, or point of view of your brand?
Promotion - Where do you meet people and how do you interact with them? What is a typical experience working with you like, and how would you handle bad work experiences?

1. Starbucks

Purpose - To inspire and nurture the human spirit

Perception - Friendly, welcoming, approachable

Positioning - Delicious coffee and food where you can relax and meet like-minded people

Personality - Relaxed, inviting, down to earth
Promotion - Clever social media marketing

2. Google

Purpose - To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Perception - Responsive, helpful, authoritative

Positioning - The fastest path to the world’s knowledge

Personality - Smart, fast, far-reaching

Promotion - Free front end products and services.

3. Curated Splash (my brand pillars)

Purpose - To provide a process that helps creatives find fulfillment while making money

Perception - Creative, supportive, magical

Positioning - Dream visioning and personal inquiry to inspire intuitive experimentation

Personality - Playful, Passionate, Pragmatic

Promotion - Value driven learning and expression, with open-minded enthusiasm

5. Positioning Statement or Tagline

A tagline is a great way to create a simple statement for your brand that serves as a curiosity hook. What is the transformation that you help create?

The best ones convey the essence of your brand and the immediate benefit that you offer.

What problem do you LOVE to solve and what SOLUTION do you specifically offer?

You also want your tagline to include WHO you work with.

👉🏾 Who do you want to help on a regular basis?

👉🏼 Who buys from you?

👉🏽 Who is attracted to your work?

Here is a simple formula:

Symptom + Solution + Result = Tagline

Here are a variety of examples:

✅ Helping anxious mamas after childbirth find confidence in motherhood

✅ Abstract art for the unconventional collector

✅ Copywriting for creative rebels who mean business

✅ I help creatives align with their purpose and make money doing work they love (that one is mine 😉)

6. Content Categories

Content categories are 3 to 5 themes that your brand will consistently share, discuss, and create content around on social media.

Clarifying your content categories makes planning your content so much easier because you have specific topics to strategically plan out your content weekly or monthly.

Your content categories will be specific to your brand and can cover a variety of themes such as:

✏️ A writer and illustrator could focus primarily on entrepreneurship, sharing art and books, and mental health

✏️ A food blogger/baker’s content categories could be recipes, ingredients, workshops, and favorite bakeries

✏️ A photographer’s pillars could be portraits, street style, body positivity, and mindset

✏️ A graphic designer could focus on marketing ideas, design trends, typography, and murals

As a Career Coach for Creatives, here are my content categories:

🪄 Career and business tips

🪄 Mindset

🪄 Workshops I host

🪄 Art shows/Museums/TASCHEN

7. Aesthetics:

Aesthetics or brand assets are what define the look of your brand and set you apart in your industry. It’s a way to breathe character and personality into your brand identity.

Here are some of the basics:

a. Color palette – 6-9 colors that compliment your values and visuals and are a mix of light and dark colors

b. Fonts – 3 go-to fonts (serif, san-serif, and a display font)

c. Brand logo, headshot, or name – use color palette and fonts and a possible design element (i.e. an icon)

d. Imagery & graphics – design elements that feel cohesive and add a bit more character

If you’re interested in learning more about brand aesthetics and how to market yourself with premium design, one of my previous clients has an amazing course, Create with Confidence, that can teach you how! Use code: LAURYN to get $50 off!!

This is a design course for non-designers where you will learn how to put together templates, social graphics, and more that are on-brand and will WOW your clients, co-workers, or employers.

All the tips I’ve shared today are guidelines rather than rules. Please take what is useful, but remember to always follow your intuition as you approach promoting yourself.

At the beginning of your career or as you start a new business, you won’t have as much experience so it might be more difficult to know who you are and what you want to create. This work takes time and experimentation!

It’s okay to get out there and start working without having a clear understanding of your personal brand. You get more clarity through doing the work and through real-life, hands-on experience.

If you need help with navigating this framework or just figuring out where to start, this is exactly what I help my clients with all of the time in 1:1 coaching.

Sign up for a free Career Strategy Consultation and we can figure out what areas you need support with.

Then get you the support you need so that you can achieve the career goals you so desperately desire!