Planning Your Personal Brand

Planning Your Personal Brand

by Emma Carney (AUS) -
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Cartoon character hoding the word 'Brand'While in lockdown, you may find you have a little more time available to work on areas in your triathlon career that will improve your personal development. An area that every triathlete, regardless of where they are in their career, or what level they race at should spend time planning in detail is their personal brand.

What is your personal brand?

Your personal brand is what you represent, what you want to be left as your legacy. It is important your personal brand also aligns with the values your sponsors or potential sponsors hold in high regard.

How do you develop your personal brand?

Personal branding requires you to develop your own unique story and must define what you want to represent and what you want others to associate with you.

Your brand begins with your unique story. Everyone has a story, and your story needs to be told in an interesting way to those who matter in your triathlon career.

You need to remember that not everyone will be interested in what you are achieving, so to maximise your impact you need to know your audience and understand your market.

Align with your potential sponsors, current supporters, those who can gain insights from your lifestyle, and be consistent with your messaging, tone, and images.

How do I establish my personal brand?

Your story needs to remain authentic, and not contrived. It must align with what you believe in (your values), what you admire in others (your empathy), and who and what you care about globally (your interests). You will promote yourself through this story and all the images it represents, so you must be capable of representing it. When you successfully articulate your values and uniqueness in your life, both online and offline you will be on the way to developing your personal brand.

The result of a successful personal branding story is that you are ultimately able to generate interest in you, develop you as a unique triathlete, and attract sponsors and supporters who also align with what you portray.

How do you plan your personal brand?

You need to specifically plan 3 key elements from your perspective:

Your ‘what’ – this is your purpose, your bigger picture, your vision and your messages that engage your audience to your story. It covers you as an athlete, your sport and all the activities around this. This is where you can be very creative in how you portray the wider view of your life and lifestyle as an athlete. You can choose how much you want the public to know, and you need to remember to keep it consistent with your goals as an athlete.

Your ‘who’ – These are yourself and the people in your life. This needs specific planning and control because if you let others into your story, you must also be able to control the images from their behaviour. Be certain those you work with are consistent with your story. You must also recognise some individuals in your life may not want to be made public or appear in social media posts with you.

Your ‘why’ – This encapsulates your motivation behind why you do what you do. This can be very influential. As an elite athlete it is part of your role to inspire your nation, so the ‘why’ in your unique story can be a very strong part of your story. Your potential sponsors will look at your why for a strong understanding of your brand, so make it clear, strong and unique to you.

Once you have defined your what, why and who that make your story, you need to then plan your online and offline ‘storytelling’. Social media platforms are obviously key to this. You should all be familiar with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Use each platform to portray your story to maximise the use of that platform. Engage often with updates daily. Social media doesn’t stand still, and if you don’t move with it, you become ‘old news’ quickly and very quickly your story will become stale.

It is very important to remember that taking photos and gathering information should not interrupt your training. You may need others to help with photos of training and various activities and to make sure your training is not affected, you may need to put time aside once a week/fortnight for some dedicated photo ‘shoots’.

In addition to social media platforms, a personal website is also useful. Create a simple site with your name as the URL, so you can be contacted, can keep supporters updated with blogs and provide potential sponsors with a professional first impression. Your site must remain consistent with your vision and what you represent.

Another method of portraying your message is by sending race reports and results to your local media outlets. Keep your stories unique and relevant and you will find often they are put to print.

This showcasing of yourself and your story takes a lot of planning. Underlying your planning must be the purpose to what you are trying to achieve – and that should be developing your personal brand to ultimately attract sponsors.

If you would like more detail on personal Branding, an excellent article can be found here:

https://www.olympic.org/athlete365/personalbrand/

Next week we will look at possible ways of approaching sponsorship and types of sponsorship, which will develop out of your personal brand.

Take Care,

Emma