Steps To Building Your Personal Music Brand
1) Create your personal brand vision
“The first step to creating your personal brand is to organize your thoughts and create your personal brand vision. This is the way you want yourself to be perceived by others and also how you want to live your professional and personal life.”
2) Define your target audience
“Defining a target audience is a best practice for anyone that needs others to give them something. It might be a salary, an investment or money in exchange for a product or service. Whenever you need something from someone you go through at least some of the steps in defining a target audience.”
3) Build up your online and offline assets
“Assets are the things you own that will communicate your brand message to your target audience. Assets are things like your own website and blog, but they can also be things like your Twitter username and your LinkedIn profile. Offline assets are things like business cards and or traditional newsletters that you send out.”
4) Build your brand through outreach
“Outreach is the act of providing value to those that have established audiences filled with the people you want to reach. You provide value and in exchange they give you the chance to sell yourself to the audience.”
5) Get free press coverage
“Getting press coverage can establish you as an authority in your industry. You can get access to audiences full of the people that can hire you as an employee, partner and vendor. Getting free press coverage as an individual can be a challenge, but it can be done and be done effectively leading to the opportunities you seek as you work to grow your personal brand profile.”
6) Connect with mentors
“A mentor is someone that can provide guidance and friendship for your life. They might have experience in the exact life path you want to pursue, but that quality is not a requirement. Often, the best mentors are simply good listeners, educators and friends.”
7) Monitor your brand
Patel shares tools and discusses ways to monitor your brand online. Remember that if you’re going to work so hard on your brand you should also work to find out what people are saying and, ideally, thinking which goes beyond the immediate feedback people are willing to give you.
8) Be yourself
Patel brings things full circle with the reminder that though you are making conscious choices about presenting yourself in public that may sometimes require you to change your behavior or appearance, they should still be based in what makes you uniquely you.