To be successful, it's not enough to have a clear understanding of your personal brand. You must also communicate it to the right people – your target audience. You’d exhaust your resources if you aimed to communicate your brand to the world at large. Successful brands are visible. But they are not necessarily visible to everyone. They are always visible to their target audience – those people who will help them achieve their goals. That’s why you need to FOCUS your message on your target audience.

For Coke, the world’s strongest brand, everyone is in their target audience. That is why you can’t go a day without seeing the all familiar Coca Cola logo and bright red color. From billboards to advertisements, product placements in TV and movies and Coke vending machines, Coke is a constant in our lives. But chances are, your target audience is going to be a lot smaller than Coke’s. And that’s good news since you probably don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on advertising!

To ensure career or business success, focus your brand communication efforts exclusively on your target audience. If you are working in a corporation and your goals involve a straight trajectory to the top, you probably know your target audience by name. These are the people who will be instrumental in helping you reach your goals. Get to know them and their needs. And develop a plan to clearly position your brand to support those needs.

If you are a consultant or business owner, your target audience would more likely be your ideal clients – those people with whom you would really like to work. Identify as much about them as you can so that you can develop a plan to keep your brand in front of them.

They key to successful brand building is FOCUS. If you direct all your efforts exclusively on your target market, you remain visible and don’t waste your efforts on those outside your target. And although it sounds counter-intuitive, the smaller you make your target, the larger your business will be. That’s because you will be able to ensure that your brand is clearly and consistently visible to your target. You will become known for what you provide and how you provide it. And you will attract business from your target without having to sell to them.

So, take a look at your goals and your offerings and then spend some time defining your target audience. Once you can clearly describe your audience, you can develop a plan to make your brand visible, differentiated and indispensable to them.

> learn how to uncover your brand