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“Can I ask you a question?” Sure, I replied. “How do you balance your personal brand and business messaging?” While not unusual, the question caught me off guard because we had just finished her role-play exam for a professional sales certification.

I thought about the question and gave her a one-word response before explaining: Alignment. Personal brand messaging and business messaging, for sole proprietors or even execs, are essentially the same, but you’ll need to work to bring your messages into harmony. When you do, you’ll build trust, simplify your efforts, and create a narrative that is easy for anyone to understand.

Here’s how to get started.

The Struggle Is Real

Have you ever felt like, we’ll call her Mary? Maybe you’re running multiple businesses or trying to find the balance between your business and personal brand. Either way, it’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to keep your messaging straight. And if you can’t keep it straight, how can you expect your audience to?

The answer lies in alignment, and here’s why aligning your messaging is the secret ingredient to brand clarity for you and your audience.

But first….Why Alignment Matters

Aligning your personal brand message and your business message is critical for the following reasons:

Build Trust and Credibility: A clear, cohesive message helps your audience know that you know your stuff. Using two distinct messages only serves to create confusion, which takes us to the next reason…

Eliminate Confusion: Disconnected messaging is like ordering a Mojito and getting a Margarita. While the message may still be good, it’s not what your audience needs to hear; this is why I work with my clients to…

Simplify Your Efforts: Unlike the Cheshire cat who declared, “If you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn’t matter which path you take,” managing your messaging becomes easier when all roads lead to one clear and simple narrative. A clear, simple message is how you…

Maximize Your Impact: When others understand your value because your message is in sync, they’re more likely to engage with you, your content, and your offers.

Or, as Donald Miller says, “If you confuse, you lose.” Alignment of your messaging is one of the most critical things you can do for your business, brand, and career.

Your Recipe for Alignment

So. How do you get there? How do you create a message that aligns your personal and business brands so well that they complement each other, like gin and tonic? It starts by asking and answering the following questions.

1: Define Your Core Identity

Since I released my book, CareerKred, I’ve been asking people to ask themselves:

“What do you want to be known for?”

All messaging starts with this question, and it applies to your business and personal lives and is the key to finding clarity, focus, and alignment. Ideally, your answer should reflect your experiences, expertise, and the problems you solve.

What do you want me to find if I look you up online? Determining what you want to be known for is the answer to that.

2: Build a Central Hub

Once you know what you want to be known for, you need to make it easy for others to figure it out. This hub will be your LinkedIn profile for most of you, but for business owners, it needs to be your website.

Your central hub is your mission control, monitoring all of your satellites from social media sites to bios on professional associations; everything points back to the hub. The hub ties everything together, aligns your message, and provides a source of truth for everything about you and your business.

Side note: Even if you are not a business owner, I recommend having a website for various career-related reasons.

3: Consistency Across Platforms

In addition to ensuring your message is consistent across your platforms, you also need to keep your voice and tone consistent across all your platforms.

The best compliment you can be paid is when you meet someone for the first time and they tell you, “You are just like I thought you would be.” When you hear this, you know your messaging is aligned.

Avoid These Pitfalls

Like anything else, there are always some traps or pitfalls you can fall into when trying to align your message, so watch out for these common ones.

Inward-Focused Messaging: While everything starts with answering the question, what do you want to be known for, that’s where messaging about you stops. Once you know this core message, your essence, if you will, you now need to flip that message to be about your audience.

Your audience cares about their problems, not your resume. You may want to be known as the best in your space but don’t tell me how great you are. Talk about how you can help me overcome my challenges instead.

Ignoring Overlaps: People believe their messaging for their personal and business brands needs to differ because they don’t see the thread that ties them together.

Because of our natural talents (strengths), all of us are predisposed to follow a “theme” throughout our careers. That theme has a thread that ties everything together. Whether executives, career professionals, or entrepreneurs, we are unconsciously drawn to certain roles, challenges, and problems.

So, look for the overlaps between your roles and personal and business brands. A common thread exists to tie them together, even if they feel unrelated. Take the time to find it.

Last Call: Alignment = Focus = Clarity

Alignment isn’t just about cleaning up your messaging (although that’s a part of it); it’s about making your value unmistakable to yourself and your audience.

Key Actions

• Define what you want to be known for.
• Build a central hub for your personal and business brand.
• Be consistent with your messaging and tone across platforms.

When your messaging aligns, your brand resonates—and your audience will take notice.

If you need help distilling and aligning your message, let’s talk. Schedule a ​FREE Distillation Call​, and we’ll figure out the best way to get your message out of the bottle and into the hands of your ideal clients.