Personal Branding vs Business Branding (James Dooley In… — Transcript

James Dooley interviews Charles Floate on the impact and strategies of personal vs business branding.

Key Takeaways

Personal branding creates more trust and engagement than corporate branding alone.
Consistency across all online profiles is essential for building a recognizable personal brand.
Entity stacking helps Google validate businesses through trusted third-party references.
Personal brands and business brands should complement each other for maximum impact.
Being a 'Key Person of Influence' is about highlighting your business, not just self-promotion.

Summary

Personal brands tend to create stronger, more impactful connections with end users than corporate brands.
Famous personal brands like Richard Branson and Elon Musk often overshadow their corporate counterparts.
Both personal and business brands should be built in alignment to maximize trust and engagement.
Entity stacking is crucial for business branding to help Google validate and trust the business through third-party sources.
Google relies on external references like social profiles, citations, and trusted websites to verify entities.
Building a personal brand involves consistent information across platforms including usernames, profile pictures, and descriptions.
Different niches require tailored personal branding strategies, e.g., lawyers vs entertainers.
Personal branding can attract high-quality staff and increase business credibility and website multiplier effects.
The concept of 'Key Person of Influence' reframes personal branding as shining light on the business rather than being an influencer.
Effective personal branding focuses on promoting services and business value rather than self-centered influencer content.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Personal branding versus business branding. Today, I'm chatting with Charles Flo. So, obviously, you've built up a lot of business brands and corporate brands, and you've got a personal brand yourself. So, I want to jump in straight away and say, if you could only build

Speaker A

one, a corporate brand or a personal brand, in your opinion, what would be more important and why?

Speaker A

I think it definitely depends on the niche you're in, right? For sure. Some. But, in general, personal brands are just way more impactful with the end user.

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Most people aren't going to be enjoying engaging with some massive corporation, but they'll be happy to engage with another human being on the end of the internet. So, I'm all for making sure that you have that personalized connection, which you can never really

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have with a corporate, right? And even if you do have some of these massive corporations kind of taking on some amazing social media managers and stuff, that job will still probably change.

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That person will leave, go in and out, and it'll be a different personality essentially running that corporate brand in the future. So, I'm a massive proponent of creating that personalized human touch so that the end user feels that they can trust

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and value the opinion or the information that you are giving to them. Yeah, I think it's crazy when you start looking at personal brands versus business brands. Like, you look at Virgin and Richard Branson. Richard Branson's much, much, got a much better

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following than Virgin. And then you look at Tesla and then you look at Elon Musk, and Elon Musk, he's got so much bigger than Tesla. And then you look at like all the Premier League football clubs and you look at Cristiano Ronaldo, and

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Cristiano Ronaldo has got more than the whole of the Premier League together wrapped up and stuff like that. So, then personal brands I completely agree have got way more clout about them, and I think people engage more, a lot more

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with a personal brand. But, obviously, I know that we both believe that you should be building both. There shouldn't be a one or the other. They should kind of align with each other. You build up your personal brand so the founder of

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the company is gaining himself out there and he can kind of engage and say, "Oh, by the way, I've created this brand." So, talking about business brands now, what would you be doing? So, we spoke earlier off air and you spoke about

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entity stacking, right? And making certain that one of the first things that you should be doing when if you ever building any backlinks or anything that is defining that entity, making certain that Google are being They understand who you are and what you do.

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Can you explain a little bit more about that of why it's important to do that entity stacking and make certain that they at least understand everything about the founder when in the founding day, the name, the address, the phone

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number, getting all that confidence and clarity for that actual business brand? Yeah, so Google, if anything, will not trust an entity, will not validate an entity, will not see if something actually exists without third-party information reinforcing something. So, you can create all the

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pages you want about a person, about an entity, about something, a company, whatever it is, on your own website, but you still need other sources to validate and reinforce information. And the best ones are the ones that Google already

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trusts. So, you're talking your social profiles, your citations, your reference sites like Wikipedia, and then also you have company kind of social media websites like LinkedIn and Crunchbase and that kind of stuff. And then you have UGC sites like Reddit and

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forums and all of these kind of things as well. And all of them play a big role in telling Google information about an entity, a person, a business, a location, or reinforcing that that is a real thing.

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Now, Google's algorithm can never physically go in through and shake your hand and know if you're a real person.

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So, they rely on the third-party sources and the web as a whole to validate that this is a real thing.

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Yeah, for sure. And then what about personal brand? So, what would you do? Someone comes along and they've got a really big corporate brand and they're the founder and they've always tried to hide behind the scenes, but now they've

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started to realize, "Do you know what?" Now they've started to realize that building a personal brand can attract a a-player staff, right? So, people go, "I really like them. I want to work for them." And they start reaching out to

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come work for this company because they like the founder. Then they start realizing that actually affects the multiplier of the actual website because they want to know who's behind, not just like what they're buying, but who was behind it and are they trustworthy

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enough? So, this business owner comes along to you now and says, "Charles, I need to build my personal brand and I need to build it fast." What information would you give to them for them to start building up their own personal brand?

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I would say, number one, what have you already got? Okay, so have you got your Twitter? Have you got your LinkedIn?

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Have you got your Instagram? Have you got all that kind of stuff? Okay, let's edit that to be the same. So, you've got the same username, the same information, the same consensus about that thing, the same URL, the same phone number, the

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same address, everything the same. Once we have those core things, and bear in mind, if they don't have any of that, then we want to go and build those core areas first and make sure that we do have a recognizable thing. You might

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then need to make sure, okay, you have the same profile picture, the same cover banner, but resized to whatever platform you're using. All of these things so that you're matching the consensus that Google can build entity. If you have all

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of those different things different, then Google struggles to build an idea about what you're actually about. So, if your Instagram says you're an author and your Facebook says you're a musician and your YouTube says you're a comedian, then Google has no idea what you really

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are. So, you need to have the same information reinforcing time and time again who you are, what you are, and why you're doing it. Now, certain niches I wouldn't build certain websites on. As an example, if I was, let's say, a

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lawyer or something, I probably wouldn't set up a kick.com stream or something along those lines, right? But if I was a YouTuber, 1,000% we would be setting up as many streaming sites as we can. We'd be setting up as many profiles as we can

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related to entertainment and all of those kind of things. So, someone who we both follow, Daniel Priestley, comes out with a great book called The Key Person of Influence. So, a lot of people that are looking there that

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are business owners or entrepreneurs, they feel like, "Oh, I don't want to be an influencer. I don't want to be on camera. I don't want to do these videos." Like, because I don't want to be an influencer. And he's like, "You're

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not being an influencer." Because an influencer is, "Look at me. Look at me. Look at the likes. Look at me. Look at me." And actually, the best business owners are key person of influence where they're shining the light on the

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businesses. And I think that that's a major play. And I think people need to understand that part when we're looking at branding, whether it's corporate brands or whether it's personal brands, that these business owners, when they're doing it and they're saying, "I don't

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want to become an influencer and me shooting a video of myself on the beach with no top on with me I'm in Dubai.

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Look at this." and stuff like that. They're actually a lot of them aren't doing that. They're talking about the services that they have and the brands that they own and stuff. And they're shining the light there. So, what's your

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thoughts on that? Is is actually being a key person o

Speaker A

I I think if you have a personal brand that is directly tied to the company, it's giving you A, it's going to reinforce all of your corporate anyway. And it will actually you'll start getting followers to the corporate brand that are coming over

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from that personal brand and vice versa. But B, it's creating that kind of real human connection. And the problem that most CEOs and most COOs and CMOs and things are, they get nervous that they will say something, do something, cause

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something along the lines that will risk their reputation, risk their job. I always hark back now to the McDonald's CEO, right? All press is good press. He did the tiniest little bite of that burger ever in the world. And then they

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sold a million burgers the next week, more than they'd ever sold of any of the burgers before, because it went viral.

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And that single moment was probably more earnings for McDonald's than any marketing campaign they'd run for the previous year. And it was in that negative sentiment about the CEO. Was he fired? No. He's probably going to get a

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bigger bonus at the end of the year as a result of those increased sales. Yeah, for sure. So, anyone who's watching this, I hope you like the episode with regards to personal branding versus corporate and business branding. Both I

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feel are very, very important with regards to SEO and digital marketing. I do believe that we're coming in the AI era, where this is the digital moat around your brands and around you and who you are. I think it's key. Charles,

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it's been absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Topics:personal brandingbusiness brandingentity stackingGoogle algorithmdigital marketingbrand trustsocial media strategyKey Person of InfluenceCharles FloateJames Dooley

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between personal branding and business branding?

Personal branding creates a more direct, human connection with the audience, making it generally more impactful, while business branding focuses on the corporate entity but may lack personal trust.

Why is entity stacking important for business branding?

Entity stacking helps Google validate a business by reinforcing its existence and trustworthiness through third-party sources like social profiles, citations, and trusted websites.

How should someone start building their personal brand quickly?

Start by ensuring consistency across all social media profiles with the same username, profile picture, and information, then tailor platforms to fit your niche and reinforce your identity.

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