Personal Branding vs Business Branding: What’s The Difference?
Working on your personal brand, but keep running into branding content aimed at companies? We’ve been there too; it’s super annoying. To see if any of that content is salvageable and still somewhat useful for you, we’ll go through the differences between personal branding and business branding.
What is personal branding?
Personal branding is all the things that make you and your content online recognizable. This includes your niche (aka what you’re known for), the way you talk, and how you make people feel.
If you’re active online, share content, or even just go to in-person events, you already have a personal brand. It might just not be strong enough yet: you need to take control and shape it intentionally if you want it to help bring you results. It’s inherently connected to you, but it can be shaped into a more characteristic and powerful version of you. Especially online.
What is business branding?
Business branding is the way a company presents itself in both its offline and online materials: from its packaging and brochures to its website and social media.
It tends to be strictly outlined in the company brand book, which is what all employees and contributors are asked to follow. Business branding is also less focused on the personality and instead highlights things like the company’s target market, values, and mission.
What’s the difference between business and personal branding?
Let’s get to the point: the difference between these two types of branding.
The overall approach
The names give away the main difference between a personal and a business brand.
The personal brand is inherently attached to the individual. It’s affected by who they are, what they do, and it also changes with them in time. It’s more casual and free to express personality, and has more freedom in following (or not) the established branding.
A business brand on the other hand is centered around a company. Instead of personality traits, it’s defined by it’s mission, vision, product, and target audience. Although it still has a brand identity, which doesn’t need to be bland and boring, it tends to be more professional and have stricter guidelines.
The visuals
The visuals in personal branding focus more on you: the photos might often include you in different settings, or just simply things more personal to you. While you’ll have a color palette and fonts, they’ll appear more often on your website (and maybe emails), but on your socials it’ll be photo and video-heavy instead of the professionally designed graphics that’d use them.
It’s often quite the opposite for companies and their business branding. The logo will have a crucial role here, and so do the colors and fonts. You’ll see lots of graphics, product shots, and strictly followed consistency. There’s less leeway here, and the content tends to be less quirky and more polished. Following the brand personality though, of course.
The brand voice
You’ll notice a theme here: when it comes to personal branding, the brand voice (or tone of voice) will have more character and personality to it. Although business brands’ tone of voice can differ loads and are often fun, the personal brand voice always tends to be more casual and authentic.
Connection with others
Thanks to the casualness and authenticity, and not needing to always follow such strict guidelines, personal branding can help you build deeper and, well, personal relationships with others.
And while your personal brand’s doing that, a business brand will be building trust, loyalty, and more of a transactional relationship with its clients and customers.
Typical marketing channels
Where you’re sharing content and promoting your brand (aka your marketing channels) is also kind of part of your branding. Imagine a super genZ creator promoting herself on Facebook. It’d be a little odd, right?
Apart from the brand’s audience and personality hinting at the right channels, personal brands tend to thrive on social media, YouTube, podcasts, TED talks, and blogs. Business brands, on the other hand, are expected to be doing PR, running ads, and focusing on things like SEO.
How can you figure out your personal brand?
If you’re not sure how to figure out all the different aspects of your personal brand, try Copyfolio.
Your visual branding on Copyfolio
Colors, fonts, and design style. You can nail all these easily with Copyfolio.
For the quickest option, you can just choose one of the designer-made color palettes and font presets that resonate with you. There’s loads to choose from, from dark themes and dramatic fonts, through soft pastels and elegant typography, to bold color-font combos that leave a big impression.
When it comes to your design style, you can use the built-in thumbnail designer to try backgrounds and gradients, the image options for playing around with shapes and mockups, or the stock photo gallery to find images that match your vibe perfectly.
Finding your brand personality and ToV with Copyfolio
Okay, but what about the harder-to-grasp parts of your personal brand, like your brand personality or tone of voice? They’ve just become way more fun, too!
Meet Brandi: your personal branding coach who's there for you ALL the time to help figure it all out.
All you have to do is chat with her, and she'll guide you through your brand personality traits, what tone you should be writing and speaking with, and even your unique selling point (USP).
As you get ahead in your conversation and find the perfect matches, Brandi will save your results on the side. Whenever you need a little refresher, you can come back and read through it again.
And even better: if you need help writing your tagline or updating your website based on your shiny new brand character, Brandi can help with that too!
If that sounds up your alley, all you have to do is sign up to Copyfolio and click Branding coach at the top. Try it for free now!
