Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you would have heard that one of the main trending marketing topics of 2024 surrounds building your personal brand. Okay fine, not in those words, but the main headlines have been: storytelling, authenticity and connecting with your audience. And honestly, how else would you be doing this without building a personal brand? 

Exactly, personal branding is IN for 2024 and cold selling is OUT. 

Now, if you haven’t started building your brand, you’re not behind, in fact, this is an exceptional opportunity to dive in head first. 2024 is the year to start getting to grips with the best tools out there to get aligned and launch on socials with confidence. 

So, without further ado, here are my top five personal branding tools that you should be using this year. 

What is a personal branding tool?

Before we launch ourselves into the tools themselves, a personal branding tool is there to serve YOU in the best way possible. Tools are essential for enhancing productivity, keeping you organised, saving you time, potentially money and hopefully (fingers crossed) keeping you less stressed during the build and continuation phase of your content strategy and brand.

You’d never put up a shelving unit without a drill or hammer and nail, so why should you approach your brand without anything to back you up? 

Personal branding tools can be anything from where you store your written content, scheduling tools or even an additional human (like us) who manages your brand for you! These are all tools that you should take into consideration from start to finish.

Best 2 personal branding tools for social media

Canva

When it comes to your overall brand identity, the best way to stay consistent is through utilising a tool such as Canva. Of course if you have a team of graphic designers doing all the leg work for you, this won’t necessarily be the tool for you. However, if you are building your brand solo, like most are, Canva is an incredible tool for you to: 

• Find your brand colours
• Create a logo 
• Build pitch decks
• Create social media content 
• Schedule socials (yes you can do this on the pro account) 
• Vision board 
• Run presentations 

You name it, this tool has it all. And before you turn your nose up at it, it can also be utilised by graphic designers to build your editable templates that you can drag and drop content into for your carousels or posting needs. 

Taplio OR Shield

Numbers are KEY when it comes to building any business, and that includes when building your personal brand. Knowing what piece of content hits and what doesn’t will support you in adapting and building out your brand strategy and voice. 

Taplio is the more expensive version of Shield, so if you’re just starting out I would 100% recommend taking a hit with Shield for the year for it to highlight your content overtime, what niche are visiting your profile more and for you to utilise your metrics to your advantage. 

There’s winging it with your brand and then there’s being strategic.

If I could have a Pound for every time I’ve spoken about my love for Notion, I’d probably be a millionaire. Notion has got to be one of the best management tools out there in my personal opinion due to its versatility and ability to store ALL of the content. Not only do we use it within the agency for our own content storage, we manage all our clients on it when building their brands. 

You can create your own workspace, plan your content with a calendar, store all your content ideas, create to do lists, goal setting…you name it. 

In fact, I love it so much, you can grab your own content creation Notion page below. 

Linkedin

No, I’m not pulling your leg here, LinkedIn is in fact the best FREE personal branding tool you can start with. It’s where you get to do your research, build out a personalised ‘landing page’ that’s yours and start making incredible connections with people within your industry and out of it. This is why it’s so important to launch your LinkedIn profile with success!

Not only can you learn, observe and replicate on LinkedIn, but you can set both you, your brand and your business up for success just by hitting post. 

It’s completely free, you don’t need to sign up to their paid versions if you don’t want to and it’s a great start of funnel for when you begin to scale your brand further.

Email Marketing

I’ve placed this tool under the heading of ‘when you’re scaling’, now, that doesn’t mean you can’t set yourself up for email marketing from the get go, but your email marketing should be a tool to utilise when you’re looking to build your funnel out. 

Don’t get swept up in having to set every tool under the sun up straight away, build out slowly. In your strategy you should look at breaking it down month by month and once you’ve got a solid flow of posting on LinkedIn or your channel of choice, then start to plan how you can deliver value through email. 

Email marketing is great way to keep connected with your audience on a deeper level, plus it gives you the security if all social channels go down and you will still have direct contact with those who gone from a ‘cold’ lead to a ‘warm’ lead.