Personal Branding For Music Therapists
by Karah Chappel, MT-BC
Whether you are doing contract work, planning to start a private practice, or simply looking to enhance your networking, a professional brand can be a great next step. I’m going to walk you through five easy steps to get your brand started!
1. Brainstorm Your Values
Your personal values drive how you interact with others and make decisions in your life; professional values do the same thing for your business interactions.
Start by brainstorming a list of values that are important to you. Ask yourself questions like, “What is important to my work?” and “What words would I want other people to use when describing me?”
2. Choose Visual Elements
Next, you need to develop the visual piece of your brand. (If you are building a company, this will include your logo.) Your goal is to create a cohesive look that ties all of your content together. Whether you are using social media or showing up to in person events, you want people to recognize you and your work.
Start by choosing a primary color, again referencing your logo if you have one. Make sure to choose a few other colors or tones that will compliment your main color. Consider using a color wheel to look for complimentary colors or look for a set of tones (jewel tones, pastels, neutrals) as a starting point.
Finally we will round this out with all the other visual elements including preferred fonts, text colors and sizes, filters, and photographic style for images.
Important note: Keep in mind the accessibility of your visual elements. Keep high contrast between text color and background color; use fonts that are easy to read; practice writing image descriptions; ensure text on images can be read by a screen reader.
3. Pick a Tone
The language, punctuation, and sentence structure that you use will determine the tone people pick up from your written and verbal content. How would you like to be perceived? Friendly, formal, knowledgeable, casual?
You may feel confident with your tone already, especially if it’s similar to how you engage in your personal life or existing work interactions. If not, consider using a tool like The Judge on Goblin Tools, an AI feature that will adjust the tone of your written content into whatever tone you want. Running your content through this tool can help you recognize wordings or content that fit your preferred character and provide consistency in your brand.
4. Compile Your Package
The most important thing about creating a brand is consistency: you want people to get what they expect every time they interact with you. This creates a solid memory of your business and provides reassurance that you are reliable and predictable. For this reason, you are going to need to reference your brand a lot!
Create a document or folder where you keep track of the decisions you made in the first three steps above, as well as other decisions that will come down the line including stock photos, headshots, accomplishments, and materials you make for social media or presentations. Referring to your past work will allow you to continue developing your niche as you go.
5. Expand These Decisions
As I’ll say again and again, you want your whole presence to be consistent with your brand. That’s why the final step is to consider how the decisions we’ve already made affect all the other parts of your professional life. When you dress for professional events can you wear your color palette? Can you add your logo to handouts when you present at conferences? Are you choosing events to attend that align with your values? Are you keeping your tone consistent across social media and emails and in person networking?
This is just a spring board to help you develop your professional brand – which will continue to develop or even change over time. Have fun finding and creating your own business niche!
Can you think of other ways to apply your brand to professional interactions? Let us know in the comments!
