Sometimes people get the misconception that brands are only businesses. However, this isn’t the case as individuals can be brands too, no matter what it is that they do for a living. You may have decided to read this article because you have an interest in branding yourself but aren’t sure where and how to start. It may seem like an overwhelming task, but when broken down into practical steps, branding yourself isn’t as difficult as it may seem. On that note, this article is going to tell you how you can brand yourself as an engineering professional.

How to Brand Yourself as an Engineering Professional: useful tips

Create a Brand Manual

If you want to brand yourself as an engineering professional, one of the first and most logical steps to take would be creating a brand manual. This should help you think through who you are and how you want to be perceived which is the most important part of branding. To help you create your brand manual, find a few steps below.

• Establish Value Proposition: To begin with, when creating your brand manual, you first need to establish your value proposition. Ask yourself what your core values are and what you want you as a brand and an individual to be known for. This is so important as these values will permeate through your messaging.
• Messaging: Following on from the previous point, messaging is a core aspect of branding as it’s the foundation of your communications. Think about how you can make sure your values shine through your messaging whether it be by your choice of words or the tone you choose.
• Create a Style Guide: Once you have a clear idea of who you are as a brand, you’re going to need to translate that visually. One way to do this is through the creation of a style guide. If you haven’t heard of one before, it essentially helps to make sure your brand image is consistent throughout everything you do. Creating a style guide may require you to do things like dictating your logo size, choosing a colour palette that you’ll stick to and choosing fonts that reflect your unique identity.

Become an Expert

Before you can truly become a successful brand as an engineering professional, you need to be an expert at what you do. This is what will capture the attention of your audience and make them stop and listen amongst other things. To improve your knowledge in the engineering field, you could consider getting more formal education. Michigan Tech’s online electrical engineering technology degree, for instance, would give you a range of knowledge on communications protocols and signal processing.

Know Your Target Market

As an engineering professional who is trying to build a brand, you could have a range of audiences. To determine which yours is, understand why you’re building a brand and whose attention you’re trying to get. If, for instance, your goal is to get the attention of employers, then your target audience may be top-level execs in companies. On the other hand, if you want to become a public figure, then you may be targeting aspiring engineering professionals.

Here are a few suggestions in terms of how you can learn about your target market.

• Understand What Problems You’ll Solve: The first thing you should do if you’re trying to define your target market is know what problem you’ll be solving for them. This is what helps make you influential and get the attention of people. Think about what you’re introducing to them that they haven’t heard a million times before. Ultimately, your market is people whose lives you intend on making better.
• Create Personas: Another effective way to find your target market would be to create personas of prospective customers. Ask yourself questions such as where they live, what their interests are and how old they are. This should give you a visual idea of the types of people you’ll be targeting.
• Research Competitors: As well as knowing who your audience is, when building a brand, knowing who your competitors are is important as well. This is because knowing such can give you an indication of what you may need to focus on or point you in the direction of gaps in the market.

Improve Social Media Presence

In this digital age, it’s difficult to build a brand without social media. This is because you’ll find that most of your audience or the people whose attention, you’re trying to get are on one social platform or another. However, to build your brand, you don’t need to be on every social platform. If you did your market research as suggested above, then you should have an idea of where your audience is likely to be. Below you’ll see a few suggestions in terms of how you could improve your social media presence.

• Set SMART Goals: As with anything, setting goals helps you stay focused on the road ahead. Decide what you want to achieve in social media whether it be gaining more followers, better engagement with your posts or social media mentions. Make sure when you set goals that they can be measured as well.
• Be Yourself: In a world where everyone seems to be focused on just getting likes, being authentic is a must. Ensure that in all of the content that you post, you’re truthful to who you are and your personality stands out.
• Create an Editorial Calendar: Being consistent when trying to improve your social media presence is essential. To help you do this, create an editorial calendar. This way, you have all of your content laid out and you can preschedule the contnt to appear on Twitter or Facebook.

Build a Community

Another way that you can brand yourself as an engineering professional is by building a community. Tying in all of the advice mentioned above together, you should be trying to tackle people with similar interests and values to you and draw them in. You want to essentially build relationships with these people and make long-lasting connections, even if it’s through a simple email or social media post.