Everyone online has a personal brand, regardless if it was created purposefully or unintentionally. People who see your posts, content, and anything you share about yourself will make an impression in the mind of your followers.
By definition, personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition, to ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact.
This article is about how someone can evaluate the success and effectiveness of personal branding, based on measuring what followers and people in the target and dislike. A public opinion-based personal brand audit is arguably the most efficient tool to measure such things efficiently.
Your self-defined personal brand statement might be entirely different from how your audience perceives you
When you start off to create and develop your personal brand, it is very likely that you will have a number of characteristics in mind that you want to demonstrate to your followers. Key values, skills, authority and a lot more you choose to communicate will be part of your brand statement. It is fairly easy to put personal brand concepts together.
Problems start with the actual implementation of your brand strategy. Your brand statement you have defined might have nothing to do with how you come across to your followers.
Instead of your backstage brand concept and statements, the opinion and ideas of your audience about you will be shaped by your actual marketing communication. Furthermore, a number of other external factors will also define your personal brand, such as your reputation, popularity, and social proof.
To manage your brand successfully, you will need to update your brand from time to time, adjusting to the present social environment, expectations, and values that your followers prefer. The relationship between brands and consumers is dynamic and must be constantly refined. This continuous process demonstrates the ambivalence of consumerism.
These two, and various other secondary factors such as social media trends require personal brands to be reviewed on a regular basis, and a personal brand audit is possibly the best way to get the necessary audience perception insights.
How to measure and evaluate how your audience sees your personal brand?
At Brand Auditor, we have various specialized audit categories – including the top seller Personal Brand Audit. This audit was designed for people who want to get feedback about what people like and dislike about their personal branding and marketing communications.
Like other Brand Auditor audits, the Personal Brand Audit is based on aggregated feedback data from market research campaigns targeted to precisely specified target audiences. Practically, our audits are market research campaigns that get back brand-related information and insights.
Here is how the Brand Auditor system works:
- You can specify the scope of your personal brand audit
- Define what groups of people will share their opinion
- Choose what aspects of your personal brand to be reviewed
- Choose the market research size, how many people should give feedback
Once you are happy with your audit configuration, you simply place your order and our system will start the targeted surveying. Feedback data includes score ratings and qualitative opinions which are all collected in our database. Once your feedback quota is reached, our system will aggregate and process all data into a straightforward, insightful report.
All audits are reviewed and verified by multiple expert auditors to make sure that data quality and the audit results are up to spotless standards.
This enables our clients to get feedback from people who are most relevant to them, depending on their personal brand purpose, line of business or other factors.
Who is a personal brand audit best suited for?
From high-school students to speakers and marketing consultants, people from all walks of life have decided to check their personal brand with Brand Auditor. We are receiving most orders from:
- High-profile professionals
- Media personalities
- Entrepreneurs
- Consultants
- Influencers
- Lawyers
- Politicians
- Speakers
- CEO-s
What insights do the audits provide?
The report structure consists of score ratings and text-based opinions. People in your survey audience will rate your selected aspects on a 1 to 10 scale. In the report, it will appear as an average for each item. Comments and other feedback received from the respondents are listed on each page.
Depending on your needs, a number of aspects can be selected, including:
- Appearance
- Professional qualities
- Social media quality
- Relatability
- Intelligence
- Track record
- Fashion
- Trustworthiness
- Leadership
- Friendliness
- and a lot more
n order to conduct a successful market research campaign, we recommend limiting each audit to 5 aspects. Choosing more aspects will reduce survey completion rates, which will result in slower market research or inflated costs.
How many respondents will rate your personal brand?
The audit configuration tool allows you to purchase up to 250,000 responses. All orders are reviewed by a human, and in case your required market research size exceeds the available market size, then we will notify you before you make a payment.
Mass-market brands can easily get 250,000 responses, however in the case of niche brands or B2B companies, or other small markets it might not be possible to collect enough quality feedbacks. We recommend going for at least 2,000 respondents.
Let’s see some use cases and examples
We regularly get personal brand orders from politicians, speakers, and influencers. For jobs that rely on popularity, keeping personal branding in line with audience expectations is essential.
Professionals and consultants
In most cases, our audits reveal information that the subject of the audit was entirely unaware of, such as people dislike his tone of voice or their clothing triggering distrust.
Another common revelation when doing personal brand audits for professionals is that they only make a good impression on people in typically low job seniorities – as more experienced people can not take them seriously.
Such underlying issues might not become apparent without a customer feedback-based brand audit.
As you see, there many details that can undermine the chances of building a professional impression. For those to whom a strong personal brand matters, it is essential to get feedback from time to time – just as looking into the mirror to check if you look okay.
Influencers
Influencers tend to be disliked for interesting reasons too, such as their personality, their video quality, or simply their voice. In fact, voice is a very typical dislike reason.
Another common reason for influencers to be unfollowed is their opinion on certain topics. Based on 100+ influencer brand audits we concluded since 2020, it seems that over 80% of regular vlog or social media content consumers do not find it important to hear the political or social opinion of influencers they follow.
In today’s cancel culture, navigating a personal brand is like walking on a minefield. It is getting increasingly important to stay in line with social and cultural trends and renew from time to time to stay relevant. Doing regular personal brand audits is an excellent source of intelligence and information to develop and keep your personal brand popular.
Summary
While some people have a very good feel about what works and what does not with re
While some people have a very good feeling about what works and what does not with regards to their personal brand and marketing communications, our intuitions should not be the only indication.
Quite often, messages one intends to convey are misunderstood, are wrongly timed, or used in a context where it has little to no relevance. Repeating communication issues are likely to undermine the credibility and authority of a personal brand, so it is strongly required to carry out brand audits regularly – at least on an annual basis.
Brand Auditor is the #1 market research-based brand auditing solution. You can confidently rely on our insights, and make informed decisions to optimize your personal brand and marketing communications.