Exercise makes everything better, and developing your personal brand is no exception. While you certainly have to take your career and how you represent yourself seriously, it doesn’t mean it can't be fun.
Moreover, developing your personal brand isn’t something you can do overnight. So, you might as well use these fun personal branding exercises to balance your hard work with some rewarding projects.
If you’re a fan of the Baker Street detective as we are, you’ll love this exercise.
Basically, this exercise consists of research and analysis. You take, let’s say, five to ten companies that are on your wish list and start spying on them.
Follow them on social media, regularly check their websites, and track down their employees, especially those working in the same department you’re interested in.
When analyzing their behavior and content, you should try to find the problem or the void that has your face on it.
E.g., let’s say you’re a copywriter. Imagine the company you want to work for provides excellent conditions to its employees and works on exciting projects. However, their website has a bad FAQ or About Us page.
So, by using the Sherlock Holmes approach, you determine this drawback. Next, you include the solution or parts of the solution through your personal brand. Therefore, once you apply for the job, you look like the best choice the company can make.
The same applies to your audience when looking for potential clients.
We assume you’re familiar with the SWOT analysis. So, you may ask why we’re mentioning this business strategy as one of the fun personal branding exercises you can do.
You’re right - SWOT is an analysis tool for businesses.
But, the point of building a personal brand is to learn how to represent your uniqueness to the world. Being unique doesn’t mean you have to be flawless. So, we recommend you take the SWOT to another level.
Every week, take a look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats career-wise. Of course, you should find a way to convert your shortcomings into strengths by implementing small-step solutions.
However, the main purpose of this exercise is to remind you that everybody has some weaknesses, and that’s completely fine. You should be aware of them whenever you’re building your personal brand, as many people tend to set them aside and show a false image.
If you’re good at drawing, you should skip this one and move to the other fun personal branding exercises. If you’re not - welcome to the club.
Whenever you feel stuck while developing your personal brand, this exercise can do magic. Why does it work for people who aren’t very talented at painting? Well, painting gets you out of your comfort zone, which is the most important thing when developing a personal brand.
Here’s an example - you’re currently trying to make a content plan for the next week. Yes, you’re a professional in your industry and have much to share. However, being top-notch in your niche doesn’t help with sharing your knowledge on your website. Therefore, you feel blocked.
Take a piece of paper and some cheap paints and try to draw something. You should do this at least once a week to feel like getting out of your comfort zone. Soon, you’ll start to feel good about that. Maybe you’ll learn some techniques. Of course, the progress is irrelevant.
What matters the most is that you constantly take action for something that’s not in your particular interest and find ways to improve. After a while, you’ll find other activities (like writing content) easier.
Personal branding works for already-established professionals with a base of clients and for people with the necessary knowledge but without work experience.
The former can use personal branding to reach out to more people and build authority, while the latter may expand their network, find more job opportunities, and learn from experts in the field.
Regardless of the group you belong to, the journalist/comedian is an excellent and entertaining personal branding exercise.
How does it work? Every once in a while, you ask the people around you and your work about how they see you. Logically, these aren’t the basic “did you like our services” questions, as we’re talking about personal and not business branding.
If you’re an experienced professional, you can have polls once a month on your website. If you have no experience at all, you can interview your friends with the same or similar careers to yours.
The questions you can ask are personal enough to help you improve and develop yet funny enough to entertain and relax everyone. That’s how you get honest answers.
Next, you sum up the answers to determine how others perceive your personal brand.
This may not be one of the fun personal branding exercises, but it’s effective. You have probably heard about the elevator pitch exercise. We call it the “mirror, mirror on the wall, is my personal brand the best of them all?”
The more you practice your elevator pitch in front of the mirror, the easier it will be to represent it. We recommend you use this exercise every day in the morning. However, it’s crucial to note that you shouldn’t use the same pitch every day, as you must prepare to share your qualities with people with different criteria and personalities.
Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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