Like it or not, people form an impression about you by looking at your social media profiles and your larger online presence. Yet most startup founders, creators, or knowledge working professionals ignore their positioning. If you’re here, you care about defining what they stand for.
Referred to as a personal brand statement, you want such a tagline to communicate your skill sets, goals, and values clearly and concisely.
Today, let’s look at a few persuasive personal brand statement examples. First, let’s answer a few basic questions about the subject.
What is a Personal Brand Statement?
A personal brand statement is your tagline if you consider yourself a product. It’s a one to two-sentence summary of your skill sets and goals — and how what you do stands out over other professionals.
Here’s a personal brand statement example: “Empowering ridiculously good marketing” by marketing thought leader and best selling author Ann Handley.
Why is a Personal Brand Statement Important?
An effective personal brand statement can help you stand out if you’re in a crowded market. It can instantly build your authority around your core skillsets. Further, it also provides a sense of greater purpose to your career. If you know what you want to stand for, you can put efforts in that direction.
Whether searching for a job or running your own business, such a statement gives you an edge over others. Once you’ve such a statement, you can use it on your resume, social media profiles, and even your online portfolio.
What Are Some Cool Examples of Personal Brands?
Oprah Winfrey has one of the biggest personal brands in the world. She’s recognized by and inspires millions across the globe. Creators in the digital realm like Mr. Beast and PewDiePie, or even authors like James Clear and Mark Manson, also have pretty recognizable personal brands.
How Effective is Personal Branding?
Usually, when you change a job, something painful happens: Your reputation disappears overnight.
Then you rebuild it with your new employer from scratch. But it does not have to be that way. You can leverage your skills and experience to build a personal brand. It ensures you have an independent reputation, agnostic to your employers.
If you have a personal brand, you establish trust and build credibility instantly — especially in crowded markets. A major drawback is that a personal brand is not scalable. It can also be taxing to maintain it.
7 Personal Brand Statements to Inspire You
To build a strong personal brand, you need a memorable personal branding statement. Here are seven examples to get your creative juices flowing.
1. “The World Needs That Special Gift That Only You Have” – Marie Forleo
Among other recognitions, Marie Forleo is well-known for MarieTV, where she interviews entrepreneurs. She is a passionate entrepreneur who catches a browser’s attention with her motivating statement.
It’s a powerful way to address those aspiring creatives and entrepreneurs (her target audience) that believe in themselves. Marie is an inspiring figure and life coach, besides being an entrepreneur. And her brand statement has undertones of all the identities she fulfills.
2. “Travel Smarter, Cheaper, Longer” – Nomadic Matt
Matt shares travel wisdom on his website. And in his personal brand statement is short, but aptly addresses the major pain points of his audience – they want to travel “smarter”, “cheaper”, and for a “longer” period.
His blog shares tips and resources that can help you travel more. Matt has done a great job of preventing travelers from getting overwhelmed by researching tirelessly on the internet. And he aptly points out the chief benefits his website can offer with his statement above.
Also, his brand statement is followed by the question, “Where do you want to go?” It does a great job of getting a prospect to take action on his site (by performing a search) as soon as they land.
3. “Saving the World From Bad Content” – Aaron Orendorff
Aaron Orendorff is one of my favorite content guys. He creates epic content and has worked with a TON of reputable businesses. His tagline, “Saving the world from bad content,” perfectly sums up his expertise.
Note that Aaron’s audience consists majorly of B2B business owners. Hence, on his homepage, he follows the above tagline with specifics that he creates a “B2B content strategy” and lays down the top benefits of his content: traffic, qualified leads, and scalability.
4. “Transform Your Life” — Tony Robbins
How about mixing our list with a renowned life coaching powerhouse? Tony Robbins is a figure most self-improvement enthusiasts are familiar with. His statement is crisp and inspiring.
It’s directly addressing the reader and grabs their attention with a compelling claim. Further, there’s a little detail in the second line for help in achieving this huge transformation goal:
“Close the gap between where you are today – and where you want to be.”
How’s that for personal brand coaching from a life coach, aye?
5. “The Customer Whisperer” — Katelyn Bourgoin
Katlyn focuses on buying psychology and aptly summarizes why you want to follow her advice with her intriguing brand statement. The copy that follows her tagline is equally persuasive for her audience of marketers. Yeah, I wanna know why people buy and be memorable!
The value prop on her newsletter opt in page is equally compelling. “I demystify buyer behavior so you can market smarter.”
6. “We’re Here To Be Our Most Valuable” — Lolly Daskal
While some may find the statement preachy, Lolly is an executive leadership coach and business consultant with a stellar reputation. Her work backs up the determination and ambition her audience expects from her. Given she’s been rated as “the most inspirational woman in the world”, it only makes sense for her to show off her confidence and assert what she believes in.
7. “Building a Portfolio of One-Person Businesses to $5M in Revenue” — Justin Welsh
Justin’s statement is outrageously appealing because he’s pursuing a tall order. You’ll rarely encounter a single doing a multi-million dollar revenue business. He further compels his audience of solopreneurs and creators to follow him on Twitter with a follow up statement. You’ll see “tweets and threads about the process” of how he’s doing it.
How To Craft The Best Personal Brand Statement?
By now, you might have understood that your personal brand statement is a punchy two-sentence phrase. Just answering these three questions can help you to nail it down:
- What are your skill sets?
- Whom do you want to help (your target audience)?
- What’s your unique differentiator?
Once you reflect on the above questions, draft a sentence defining your value proposition. Look at it and polish it until you like what you see. Then get feedback from a mix of people in your industry and outside of it to refine it further.
You can use the below simple brand statement template to create your own:
“I specialize in [your unique skillsets or expertise], helping [your target audience] [achieve specific outcomes] through [what you do].”
Using ChatGPT as Your Personal Brand Statement Generator
Whether you want personal brand statement examples for accounting, finance, sales, or any other industry, the magical AI chatbot — ChatGPT — can help.
Sign up (for free) on its website. Provide a specific prompt to ChatGPT for generating your personal brand statement and let it weave its spell. For example, I told ChatGPT that I’ve ten years of experience in content marketing and some more details of my career:
Look at some of the personal brand statements it generated for me:
You can use the generated personal brand statements to get your juices flowing and
Note that the more details you provide, the more useful samples of these personal brand statements would ChatGPT generate for you. Share if you’re a manager, leader, or an entry-level executive in your industry.
You can even feed your author bio to ChatGPT and ask it to create a personal brand statement. Here’s a prompt you can use for the same:
“I’ll share my author bio and want you to create a one-sentence crisp and persuasive personal brand statement for me based on that. Make it focused on my achievements and my unique skillsets.”
Once ChatGPT replies that you can share your bio, you can copy it and let it return your statement.
Final Thoughts
Building expertise that can differentiate you from competitors is great. But you need to articulate what you do and how you’re different. A personal brand positioning statement is a short and memorable phrase that does the same.
Remember that this statement is a dynamic entity. It should reflect the progress in your professional career and growth in your skill sets or unique attributes.
