Wandering around aimlessly and picking up tasks randomly never really leads anywhere. The same goes for your online presence: strategic branding is the key to making it work. Even though branding might feel like something you do just to tick a box, then let it collect dust, it can actually make or break the success of your career.
If you feel called out (sorry not sorry), just read this guide to see how you can do strategic branding without doing weeks of research and analysis, giving up after the first phase. Instead your can try Brandi, Copyfolio’s branding coach, who will make branding feel fun—and like something you actually want to do.
Strategic branding for personal brands vs businesses
Although the main concept is the same (working on your visibility and recognition based on a brand strategy), strategic branding still looks a little different for businesses and personal brands. Lots of articles only cover the former, so let’s see the differences.
Strategic branding for businesses
The process won’t look the same for all businesses either, of course. It depends on the size of the business and its market, mostly.
A small business with only a few people (or a single marketer) working on its marketing won’t be able to do as much as a big enterprise with a whole marketing department. With that, their brand strategy will be simpler (with fewer channels) and their strategic branding activities fewer.
Companies with multiple products or services also need to decide how they want to brand and communicate those. They can have:
- a branded house with all products under one brand (think Apple)
- a house of brands, with independent brands under one company (think Unilever)
- sub-brands, where certain products within a bigger brand are separated, like Google Pixel products within the Google brand
Logically, a branded house needs the least amount of resources, so smaller businesses tend to go with that approach.
Strategic branding for personal brands
The personal brand of a creative copywriter
Things like these brand types will be totally irrelevant for personal brands. Strategic branding for creators and entrepreneurs will also be more straightforward than for businesses.
Although personal brands might evolve to levels where one hires help for marketing, so after a certain point, a personal brand strategy can definitely look similar to that of a small business.
The uniqueness of strategic branding for personal brands is that the brand foundations will always be centered around you, and the profiles used for marketing will also be way more personal. There won’t be as much focus on “traditional brand assets” like a logo. Instead, it’ll be your message and aura that’ll do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to brand recognition.
The branding activities will have overlaps with business branding: you’ll most likely also post on social media, you might write a blog or run a podcast, and you’ll hopefully also create a website that can represent your brand. Some might look different, though. Businesses won’t have coffee chats with others in their field, and you probably won’t want to drop millions of dollars for a 30-second spot in the Super Bowl commercials.
The must-haves of a personal branding strategy
To do things strategically, you need to have a plan. So let’s first see what you should have in that plan—then we can move on to how to figure out each of those.
1. Target audience
Yes, even as an individual, you have a target audience.
If you’re a professional looking for a new full-time job, it’s the person from HR or your future manager who’s going to hire you. If you’re a UGC creator, then it’s the brands you want to work with. If you’re an entrepreneur running a podcast, it’s the people who are going to listen.
2. Unique selling point
Once you have your audience, you need to be able to tell them why you are the perfect choice for them—that’s exactly what your unique selling point (aka USP) does.
It’s not necessarily the same thing as your main tagline, but rather something you can refer back to. It’s your personal brand’s core message that you need to continuously get across. It essentially says what you’re the best at and how that makes you unique.
3. Brand personality
Any content you read or watch has a vibe, a personality. It could be serious and formal, funny and casual, or anything in between. When you look at this across all the content you create for your brand, that’s your brand personality.
Your brand personality is usually described with adjectives, the same way you’d describe a friend. It shows how you show up and communicate, and how you make others feel. Part of it depends on what’s authentic to you, but your target audience (and their preferences) have a small say in it too.
4. Tone of voice
One way of showing that personality is with the way you write and talk, which is what we call your tone of voice. Your tone of voice shows up in the:
- kinds of words you use (are they formal or casual?),
- way you refer to people when you talk to them,
- punctuation and capitalization you prefer (think starting all sentences with lower caps for example, which is typically genZ),
- jargon (or lack thereof) that you use,
- types of emojis you use,
- speed and cadence of your speech, when it’s not in writing.
Even if it sounds OTT, it’s good to have all these written down for yourself, so you can check if your content really matches it. That’s the secret to a consistent brand identity and tone of voice all around.
5. Social media strategy & content pillars
For people to be able to perceive and recognize your brand, they need to find it first. It’ll be no surprise when we say: you’ll need to put yourself out there, and start posting on social media for that.
As with everything else, you can’t go into it without a plan, though. And that’s what your social media strategy and content pillars are for.
Your social media strategy outlines which platforms you should focus on, as well as in what formats and how often you should be posting. Your content pillars will give you the main themes for these posts, so you can get your message across effectively and build your brand with them strategically.
6. Website & portfolio
Posting on social media is essential for visibility, yes. But with today’s algorithms? You need to have an online hub that you own, aka a website. Just the fact that you have your own website (and especially if it’s on a custom domain) shows others that you take your career seriously.
It’s the perfect place for housing your portfolio of work samples to show your expertise, displaying your testimonials or recommendations from previous colleagues to build your credibility, or even just to introduce yourself and show a bit of your brand personality.
How to do strategic branding for your personal brand easily
You could spend weeks doing research and all kinds of analysis to try to figure all of these out. But we’re here to save you all that time and frustration and show you a simpler and way less frustrating method instead.
The easiest way to do strategic branding for your personal brand in 2026 is by using Brandi, Copyfolio’s AI branding coach. Here’s how that process will look (spoiler alert: it’ll take you less than an hour).
1. Create a Copyfolio account
This first step will take you just one minute. Create a free Copyfolio account, and choose Branding at the very beginning. You’ll get to your chat with Brandi right away.
2. Chat with Brandi to define your personal brand
Your first order of business will be defining your brand character, aka your USP, brand personality, and tone of voice. You don’t need to know anything about them going into this. Just answer Brandi’s questions as honestly and as thoughtfully as you can.
Be prepared: she won’t let you get away with generic, meaningless answers. Because if your brand were to be built on that, the end result would be the same. Bland, boring, having nothing to do with you. Brandi’s going to ask about the kinds of people and companies you aim to work for, the type of projects you love, and what it is you’re really good at.
So take a moment to think it through, don’t be afraid to dig deep, and keep answering. Don’t worry, even like that, this part will take about 15 minutes.
Need help with your visual branding too? Ask Brandi, and she’ll create a color palette and choose on-brand fonts for you.
3. Get your social media strategy & content pillars from Brandi
With the basics done, it’s time to work on your visibility. The method will be similar: Brandi will ask you questions, you can ask back for her opinion, and together you’ll put together a social media strategy. It’ll outline:
- the social media platforms you’ll be posting on
- your chosen post formats
- how often you’ll post on each
Then as an extra, you can work on your content pillars together to make posting less daunting and more efficient at the same time. This won’t take you much more than 5 minutes.
You can stop here in regards to social media, or ask Brandi for more help with things like writing you a perfectly on-brand LinkedIn bio, drafting your first few posts, or giving you ideas for video scripts.
4. Ask Brandi for help with creating your portfolio
Visibility is great, but you’ll need to prove your expertise to all these people. The best way to do that is with a portfolio showing your past work, of course.
First, you gotta pick which pieces of work you’d like to show. Don’t try to cram in everything you’ve ever created. Not only will people not have time to go through it all, it’ll also make your portfolio look messy. Aim for the 5-10 best samples instead.
Not sure how to pick? You can talk it through with Brandi—and she can even add them to your actual portfolio.
On Copyfolio, you have loads of different options for showcasing your work. You could:
- upload your short-form video into a beautiful gallery or with some extra info next to them (people will be able to play the videos right on your site),
- embed long-form videos from YouTube for a faster page load and smooth user experience,
- add a portfolio section, where you can add case studies, PDF files, or external links that people can check by clicking on their thumbnails,
- display images like screenshots of your social media posts—you can even add them into mockups, and write their caption or performance numbers underneath,
- upload an image or video on one side, with text and a button linking out on the other,
- write blog posts if it’s your content writing skills you’d like to display.
With all the different sections on hand, you can get really creative and find a way to showcase any type of work you’ve done. Depending on how detailed you go, this part could take around 10-20 minutes.
5. Build your personal website
The personal website of a marketing leader, made with Copyfolio
Your portfolio pieces (and other important info) need a home, and the best one for them is your personal brand website.
The good news is that the moment you created your Copyfolio account, you got a starter website too. It has three pages and is filled with sample content based on your profession, so you get an idea of what to write and where when you sit down to make it yours.
You can rewrite, add, and delete sections, change the template, colors, and fonts—and of course fill it with all kinds of content you want to showcase. You have an easy-to-use, visual editor (the what-you-see-is-why-you-get type with no backend), so you can do it even if you’ve never touched a website before.
To be truly professional, you should also get a custom domain, think yourname.com. You can buy it right within Copyfolio, and it’ll be set up for your site automatically, no extra steps needed.
You can easily customize and set up everything in just about 20 minutes. Just don’t forget to publish your site when it’s done, then add its link to all of your social media profiles.
All your strategic branding questions answered
In case you’re still left with any burning questions after reading that, here are a few more answered directly.
Strategic branding is essentially all the activities you do to make your online presence consistent and work on your visibility. If you do it right, your target audience will see you and your content time and again, and will grow to recognize your personal brand for the right reasons.
If you’re not strategic about your branding but just make a logo with a color palette and call it a day, you’re leaving money on the table. It’s either that your online presence will look mishmashed (which will turn clients and employers away), will communicate the wrong things, or you won’t even show up in your audience’s feeds.
But when you’re strategic about branding and use all your brand assets and activities to their full potential, it’ll all come together in a brand that clearly communicates your core message and shows up at the right place at the right time.
No, you don’t need an agency to create a branding strategy for your personal brand. You can get the same results with a quicker turnaround time, while also saving thousands of dollars, with Copyfolio’s branding coach, Brandi. Working with an agency is a better fit for great enterprises with multiple brands within their company (think a house of brands like P&G), with way more assets and complex nuances that aren’t so easy to handle.
To put it simply, strategic branding is the collection of activities that execute the plan that is the brand strategy. The strategy outlines what you need to do, and you’re doing strategic branding, when you’re taking steps to follow it.
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