Personal Branding for Executives: Actionable Guide + CEO insights
Time is precious when you have a team and company to lead. So how do you find time for personal branding as an executive? Is it even important enough to prioritize, as everyone’s saying?
To prove that it is (sorry to be adding one more thing to your never-ending to-do list) and show you how you can get it done more easily than you’d think, we sat down with UXstudio CEO & UXfolio/Copyfolio founder David Pásztor to get the unfiltered truth about building an executive personal brand.
He shared what moves made the biggest impact (like the talk that landed 50+ new hires) and how he makes it work without spending too much extra time on it. So here’s your actionable guide, complete with David’s insights, that you can start using to build your personal brand today.
What’s executive personal branding
At its core, personal branding for executives is the same as for everyone: taking steps to manage how people see you, to open new doors, and steer your career in the right direction.
But executive branding is not about trying to go viral like an influencer or finding the perfect color palette. It’s about building your reputation and industry authority to help both you and your company get ahead. And also about creating trust between you and your audience, whether they’re other executives, headhunters, or even potential new hires.
Why C-level personal branding is non-negotiable today
Reputation and new opportunities always sound good, but also a little vague. So here are a few specific things to show you why C-level personal branding is actually worth your time.
Your thought leadership can help your company
People buy from people, especially these days. So no matter how strong your company’s USP is, your products or services will always be more popular if people feel like they’re connecting with someone they trust when they choose them.
To put it simply: a strong executive personal brand can help not just the visibility but also the sales of a company, especially when it comes to B2B.
Your brand can land you top talent
It’s not only sales that your personal brand can bring in, but top talent too.
UXstudio CEO, David Pásztor, has seen it firsthand. After sharing how his self-managing company works (think transparent salaries and bottom-up decision making) in his TEDx talk, the ROI wasn’t just views.
During interviews with new team members, many people mentioned it. There were more than 50 people that we hired, who brought this up in their interviews, so the talk had a huge impact.
You might not have thought about it until now, but as an executive, your own personal brand might just be your strongest recruitment tool.
It could be the tie-breaker for your next position
At the C-level, everyone competing for the position has an impressive resume. So when executive search firms look for and board members decide about new leaders, a stellar track record is just the baseline. It’s your public reputation that’ll get you the job.
They aren’t just hiring your skills but also your image. A strong personal brand shows stakeholders how you lead, think, and how the market responds to you, before you even set foot in the boardroom.
A sustainable personal branding strategy for executives
Hopefully by now you’re convinced that executive personal branding is worth your time. So let’s get to the actionable part: how to actually do it, without wasting time or losing your marbles in the process.
Step 1: Define your executive brand
You can’t use something without knowing how it works, so the first step is to figure out what makes you unique and how you want to present yourself. But let’s be honest, it’s much easier said than done. As Copyfolio’s founder, David points out, standing out online is one of the hardest parts of the process:
It's very difficult to find your voice and unique insights, so you aren't just repeating everyone else. You have to do it in an environment that actually rewards people who are just repeating everyone else.
So if these things don’t stand out to you from the get-go, don’t worry. Try talking it through with Copyfolio’s branding coach, Brandi, who will help you figure out your USP, brand personality, and tone of voice. All that, with just one no-strings-attached chat that won’t take you more than 10 minutes.
David, as a founder and CEO, also used Brandi to get clear about his brand.
Brandi is an AI coach who asks you questions and helps you figure out your own unique selling point and tone of voice. What she helped me with the most was looking at my brand from an external perspective and see it more clearly.
With that, you’ll have your foundational brand assets, aka your brand character, to refer back to whenever you create content or prepare for an engagement.
Step 2: Build a digital home base
Having a digital home base that shows off your values and the personal brand you just established is at the core of this whole process. When people Google you (because trust us, they will), you want them to find this page first, where you’re presented exactly the way you planned.
This will help shape your image and show people that you’re invested in yourself and your career, since you took the time, effort, and resources to have it all set up properly. This space online could either be your LinkedIn profile or your own website.
The LinkedIn profile of UX studio’s founder CEO, David Pasztor
Centering your executive brand around your LinkedIn profile
A popular option amongst founders and CEOs is to use LinkedIn for personal branding. It’s great because it not only lists all your accomplishments on a page, but also lets you share content that others can interact with and network with people from your industry at the same time.
It’s great because your posts can get to many people thanks to the algorithm (yay visibility!), but also risky because your success on the platform depends on that very same algorithm.
Having “just a LinkedIn profile” and no other online presence can also look a little unprofessional, especially when you’re in between positions with no company profile to boast about your expertise.
Focusing your branding efforts on your own website
Having a personal brand website saves you from that: it’ll always be up and ready to find, not relying on the whims of an algorithm for its visibility. Except it might still be. 🫣
If you want to write a blog on your website for thought leadership pieces and plan on driving traffic to it from search, the performance will still depend on the search engines’ algorithms. And if you’re trying to promote your website-hosted content on social media, it’s pretty much the same.
But if you just need a page for people to land on when they’re specifically searching for you—or one to send them to when you appear in podcasts or host talks, having a website instead of just a LinkedIn profile is still the way to go.
Step 3: Turn internal insights into public content
Having a thought-out profile set up is the first step. But for a strong brand, you want to stay on top of people’s minds, and for that, you need to publish content consistently.
This might very well be the most daunting piece of the puzzle. (Who has time to come up with and write posts all the time?) The good news is that you don’t have to create a viral masterpiece every Tuesday. The real secret is just staying in the room. As David explains:
I really believe that consistency is the key here. It's maybe not even about the quality of your content, but being there every week and doing that for 10 years has a compounding effect.
We’ll talk about it more in the section about scaling up, but the key to making content creation quick and efficient is having a system:
- Think about the parts of your day that could be insightful: like an all-hands meeting or strategic planning session, plus your main areas of interest and expertise. These will be your content pillars.
- Decide how often you want to post, and create a simple content calendar (you can use Notion or even just a Google Doc), assigning a content pillar to each posting date.
That’ll give you the main theme of what to post about. You then just need to get specific and write it out. And not every piece has to be long or deep (nobody likes those pretentious LinkedIn posts that force life lessons into every ordinary moment).
If that still feels like too much planning and you’re confident you can write on a whim, just schedule 15 minutes for content creation in your calendar at least once or twice a week.
In that time slot, sit down, write out your thoughts, and hit publish. You can of course always ask Brandi to tidy up the post a little if you need to.
As long as it shows a glimpse into your thinking, way of working, or expertise, you’ll be good to go.
The biggest executive branding mistakes
Small efforts over time add up, and it’s really not as difficult as you might think. But there are still some common mistakes executives make with personal branding that we want to help you avoid.
Mistake 1: falling off the face of the Earth every so often
You start something. You’re excited. You give it your all. Until you get busy, put it off once, twice, and then months go by, and you realize that oops, you haven’t done it at all. Feels familiar? You’re not the only one. Even the CEO of a branding platform isn’t immune to the occasional disappearing act. As David admits:
I have these cycles where, for some years, I'm obsessed with posting and creating content. But then I get fed up, and for years I'm totally silent. Which is probably not the most professional way of doing it.
Here are a few ideas to help you avoid this mistake.
Get clear on what’s realistic with your schedule
If you planned on posting three times a week (and you did while you were excited about it at first), but then realized it’s more daunting than thrilling, just adjust the frequency.
If once a week or even just once a month is what’s doable right now, that’s okay. It’s still more than nothing and will still help you stay present and on top of people’s minds.
Schedule content creation in your calendar
Treat it like your other meetings and responsibilities, and add it to your calendar. It will not only remind you of posting, but will also give you time undisturbed to sit down and get it done. Even 10-15 minutes can be enough.
Delegate parts of the process if you need to
If you noticed that a certain aspect of creating content makes you want to avoid it, consider delegating it to a team member. That could be coming up with the initial post ideas, tidying up your messy drafts, or actually uploading it to LinkedIn. With the painful part out of the picture, you might just start enjoying it once again.
Mistake 2: delegating your voice entirely
Speaking of delegating: it can be helpful, but not if you’re trying to get someone else to do it all. When asked about this somewhat controversial topic, Dávid said:
I hear very extreme views. There is a camp who say that you should never ever hire a ghostwriter... And then there are some kids on X or LinkedIn who say, 'I automated everything.' I don't really take either approach. I don't think that outsourcing things to another person or an AI is bad by default. But I do have a feeling that when you're building your brand, it has to come from you, so you can't outsource everything.
You might not hear many people with these views, because, as he later mentioned, talking about a balanced approach is probably not exciting enough to get you loads of engagement on LinkedIn.
Delegate parts if you need to, but make sure your unique brand voice and insights still shine through.
Mistake 3: only publishing, never engaging
If you’re only hopping on LinkedIn to publish your posts, then log right off, you’re leaving money on the table. It’s not going to harm your reputation, so if you really don’t have the time, you can of course skip this step. But if you want to maximize your reach and personal branding efforts, you should stay on a little longer to engage.
LinkedIn’s algorithm is great at pushing posts with comments under them to others, so engaging with others’ pieces can be a great low-effort alternative to posting if you want to stay present.
How to scale executive branding efforts without burning out
With your first few posts behind you and reminders on the calendar, we’re here to give you some tips on scaling your branding efforts in a way you can actually sustain. Or more precisely, a personal branding tool that’ll make your life easier: Brandi.
You know by now that she’s here to help you lay down your brand foundations. But did you know that she can also help with:
- deciding what your content pillars should be,
- putting a realistic content schedule together,
- brainstorming or even writing new posts,
- updating your LinkedIn bio so it’s on-brand,
- generating a new headshot for you from a photo you upload?
You can log back into Copyfolio and chat with her anytime, all your previous discussions (and your brand assets) will be there.
As you can see, all it takes is a little time at the beginning, and a good system, and personal branding can definitely be sustainable, even for executives.
Yes, it takes some upfront effort, but the payoff isn’t even a question. When Dávid looks back on his biggest career wins, one thing is crystal clear: the ROI speaks for itself:
Both of them [the TEDx talk and the book] needed investment—like a lot of time investment—to make them happen. [But it was] definitely, definitely worth it.
If you’re ready to start working on your executive personal brand, create a Copyfolio account for free and start ironing out the details with Brandi!
