For fitness professionals such as Personal Trainers and athletes, and for those who aspire to be both, your personal brand is vitally important to gaining awareness of who you are and what you do. Your personal brand is that perfect combination of who you are, what you do, and what makes you different from others in your field.
Your personal brand is what you use to build a connection to your audience, your prospective clients, and your potential sponsors, so it’s important that you present yourself in the kind of light that aligns with them.
Why is having a Personal Brand important?
A personal brand is something that has become more significant in the modern age, particularly for professionals who rely on social media to gain work and a valuable audience, including those who work in the fitness industry.
People connect emotionally with other people and brands whose values, behaviours and personalities align with their own, so having a strong personal brand will help you to find the right audience to drive your career forward through increased awareness.
How can I Develop my Personal Brand?
There’s no rapid recipe for developing your personal brand; it can take time and patience to hone, but here are some tips for building a presence.
- Define Your Area of Expertise
As you build your personal brand, you need to define what it is that you do, and what you specialise in. You’re looking to gain an audience that is invested in what you say because they’re interested in what you’re talking about. They want to learn from you as the industry expert.
- Present Your Values
The age-old saying which is as true now as it ever was, is people buy from people. Your personal brand is your opportunity to present the values that you hold dear. Are you all about transformation? Diversity? Positivity? By presenting and maintaining the values you represent in your personal brand, you will attract clients who share those same values.
- Get busy on Social Media
Your best way of reaching new and invested audiences is to harness the power of social media. Engage with people and brands regularly; it’s not enough to purely share your own news and views and expect others to pay attention to what you have to say. You need to engage with the content of others. Share their news and views, engage on their posts until they sit up and pay attention to who you are and what you do. Follow the hashtags that most closely reflect what you’re about and engage with people who use them.
- Have a solid content strategy
Content is crucial to your personal brand, and the way you develop it. It gives people something to engage with, and to look forward to seeing. All social media channels are now very visual platforms, with video and photography taking front of the stage.
Using Video and Photography to engage your audience
Use video to speak to your audience as you deliver training hints and tips or create authentic behind-the-scenes videos that show the real person behind the account. Short form videos are big news right now, so keep your content short for the likes of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but don’t neglect the power of YouTube, which remains one of the very top platforms in terms of visitors and post more substantial content there regularly to build a subscriber list.
Photography is a massive opportunity for you to keep up a regular stream of content that promotes you, your brand, your clients and the other brands that you work with. There are so many different creative ideas that you can use to engage your audience. One of our recent blogs really digs into some of those ideas, so be sure to go and look.
By using regular photography, you can keep your content fresh and relevant, and change it up depending on the objective. Work on strategic partnerships one month, by creating UGC in the gym or on location at home to show the person behind the brand.
Or why not work with a professional photographer at their studio to capture some slick and eye-catching UGC that can help to mark you out as a serious prospect for other brands, which in turn can elevate your own personal brand?
Regular Photography Shoots Can Help Boost your Motivation
As a fitness professional or fitness fanatic, it can sometimes be difficult to maintain motivation. To keep going in pursuit of your goals. To keep the different plates spinning and smash through the barriers that might stand in your way.
One way of pressing on and keeping a high level of motivation is to take part in regular photography shoots that highlight the physical transformation?
Incredible fitness photography can really improve your confidence and inspire others to follow suit. It doesn’t matter whether you’re preparing for competition and in the midst of bulking up, in the off-season simply maintaining your physique, or in the process of a full body transformation with a PT. Regular photography can help you to retain focus, and see the changes almost in real time, as give you something amazing to share with your growing audience.
Picture Perfect Photography offer short- and long-term subscription packages that can tie in perfectly with your personal brand building efforts. We offer fantastic regular photography deals that incorporate content strategy sessions with our experts.
Combining Photography and Fitness Experience
Our principal photographer Collette Evans is no stranger to personal brand building, or to phenomenal professional fitness photography. She combines over twenty years of photography experience with her title-winning bodybuilding career regularly, to offer expert help and advice to fitness professionals and athletes around how to use professional imagery to drive their personal brands in different ways.
Collette regularly delivers high quality content on her own platforms, including UGC created in partnership with some amazing brands, such as MuscleFood and Reflex Nutrition, and she is well-placed to assist her new and regular subscription clients not only in how to capture the very best visual content, but also how to use it to the best possible effect.
If you’re at a crossroad with your own personal brand, why not book a discovery session with Collette to help us to understand your objectives, and let regular sessions with Picture Perfect Photography take your personal brand to the next level and beyond.
