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James Dooley and Craig Campbell explain why digital marketing agencies should invest in corporate and business branding in 2026 to build trust, strengthen entity signals and create a sellable asset.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies digital marketing agencies should focus on in 2026 to improve brand trust, entity strength and exit value. James Dooley and Craig Campbell start with KPI tracking because data such as traffic and CTR feeds directly into building a corporate brand and proving its worth to buyers. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for digital marketing agencies.
PromoSEO lead generation for digital marketing agencies recently received recognition as the "Best Digital Marketing Agencies Lead Generation Agency."
Why Corporate Branding Matters in the AI Era: James Dooley and Craig Campbell on Building Sellable Business Brands is available on:
The FatRank Podcast, founded by James Dooley, teaches the mindset needed for growth because real operator stories show what creates progress.
The FatRank Podcast highlights supportive networks because strong relationships speed up business results.
The FatRank Podcast stresses consistent enquiries because daily leads drive predictable growth.
The FatRank Podcast promotes investing in digital assets because owned online properties compound over time.
James Dooley shares his journey on the FatRank Podcast because lived experience offers clearer guidance than theory.
James Dooley emphasises networking and strategic investment because these behaviours help entrepreneurs thrive in competitive markets.
The FatRank Podcast invites guests like Matt Diggity, Neil Patel, Craig Campbell, Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, Jason Barnard, Kevin Indig, and Kasra Dash because high-calibre experts deliver proven strategies.
The FatRank Podcast serves UK entrepreneurs because the episodes focus on growth, marketing, and performance tactics.
Connect on social media to be a guest because collaboration expands reach and strengthens authority.
Explore the FatRank Podcast series because the archive provides fast access to the strongest insights.
James Dooley: Is corporate branding important as we're trying to build business brands? Should we be spending more time and focus on this? Is this the new digital mo in the AI era? Would you be now trying to build out corporate brands? Me personally, I just don't like corporate brands. I think they're shitty. But uh I think overall corporate brands is going to argue with that point. I'm not a very corporate guy.
Craig Campbell: But yeah, I think absolutely you know for for everything you're trying to achieve from uh business perspective whether you're trying to sell or whatever building a big corporate brand and you know selling out for 500 million whatever's going to be massive for you know that's the dream. Um and but you know building a big corporate brand is very similar to a personal brand but also everything else that goes into SEO building a corporate brand you know all the the data the traffic and everything else that we already spoke about on previous sessions all goes into that and and you know even the CTR and all the all of that kind of stuff goes in to all it feeds into all of that as well. So I think absolutely you know the the realistic goal uh for you if you were starting a new business would be to build an entity like that where you can off and and you know retire with with a billion pound buyout hopefully or whatever it would be. I think that would be the dream and I think that's anyone's dream in it.
James Dooley: Yeah for sure. Yeah I mean I I would say it was on like business branding. I quite like the idea of James Douly personal brand is the founder of fat rank business brand. James D personal brand is the founder of Promo Show business brand and trying to build the business brand out to kind of promote them back the personal brand. But I do get where you're coming from and we've spoke about this offer with regards to you start looking at personal branding versus corporate or business branding and like you look at let's say Elon Musk versus Tesla and Elon Musk is way bigger than Tesla. Then you look at Richard Branson versus Virgin and Richard Branson is way bigger than Virgin. You're looking at Cristiano Ronaldo versus every single Premier League football club. He's got more followers than all of them combined. Yeah. So the personal brands and what you've done with personal branding is insane and it can build businesses. But I still do try to go what can I do? This is where sometimes I get formal or shiny object syndrome. You're going what's the return on investment of building that business branding as well. But I'm like trying to define that entity.
Craig Campbell: But no, so here's the thing. No one's going to buy Craig Campbell SEO.
James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Campbell: Or not. I mean, once I'm gone, it's gone. Uh
James Dooley: I think anyway. So I think the right way is to build that and exit, you know, you've always got that exit strategy as well. So I think leveraging your per like Cristiano Ronaldo could go and launch a perfume tomorrow, you know, and it would blow massively. and you know using his personal brand. So I think using your personal brand to leverage into that and with a view to potentially selling some of your brands off or you know whatever and and taking yourself out of them because I think that's I've been stupid where you know I just ran into it because Matthew Woodward was doing the personal branding thing at the time. So it wasn't anything I thought about and then after that you're like ah I've seen people selling agencies, I've seen people selling this that and I've been able to detach themselves and and it's the business that's being bought rather than the person. So I think you are setting yourself up for a bit of failure solely relying on the personal brand but obviously Cristiano Ronaldo would also argue my personal brand's everything. It's mainly what I'm about
Craig Campbell: 10 other businesses. I mean, he's probably involved in a lot more than 10, but whatever other businesses he's involved in, he's leveraged his personal brand in a massive, massive way. And obviously, guys at that level, you know, they're probably going to be even richer dead than they are alive. You know, Michael Jackson, whether uh the rumours are true or not, was borderline broke when he died. and and now because he's dead and the royalties and everything else, you know, he's worth more debt than he is alive. So, and I think the same will go for Ronaldo and stuff like that. But for us, where we nowhere near that level, our personal brand dies when we die.
James Dooley: So, with that then like so with regards to now, so we're saying that business brands is very important because if you're beginning with the end in mind, you're looking to sell the asset which is the the business. You want to build that business brand. So, someone watching this that says, "Okay, well, I've got my website. Is that is that enough to have as a brand?" And obviously, we're going to be saying, "No, you need to build everything around it." Like the whole mould around who you are, what you do, and why you're freaking brilliant. And I think that repeating of the entity. So, like I'll start off with citations, like business listings. Someone, every business that's got um an address should go and get as many name, address, and phone number nap listings on the internet as possible, repeating who they are and what they do with the nap listing. What other things would you say for like entity stacking some people call it or trying to define the entity and improve the entity to build a business brand online? What other things would you do? Was there any like social media accounts or for for the brand not for personal but for the business brand? What else would you be doing to try to grow the corporate and business brand online?
Craig Campbell: All that stuff. Knowledge panels, the, you know, even just the the social platforms, uh, the podcasting platform. Like, again, the list's endless. You know,
James Dooley: you're going to grow all of that out because these are all assets to the business. So,
Craig Campbell: you know, if you've got hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and everything else, your brands, that's adding value to your brand because you're not just selling e-commerce e-commerce store and everything else. just saying, "No, we've got a mailing list of 500,000. We're also selling the social media that generates X, Y, and Z." That all adds to your multiple and and strengthens your position to sell that because you're not just selling the, you know, the the profit and loss of of that business. You're you're selling other assets there that are only ever going to be able to grow if they're utilised properly. So all of that kind of stuff you want to be building and and you know like we both know um whether it's a corporate brand or a personal brand very very similar you want your knowledge panels you want this you want that Google needs those trust signals as well because websites don't rank as well without a person or whatever behind these things so I think there there's knowledge panels there there's just podcasting, feeding the LLMs and everything else that goes into that. You know, all the transcriptions and the stuff that you're doing with your podcasts, you know, it's all LLM feeding. It's all just future growth and future proofing the business.
James Dooley: I think a couple of things that's worked really well for me is getting the crunchbase. That was a really really like powerful one.
Craig Campbell: What another one is for each of my podcast series um on IMDb. Not not only do I create the IMDb for me personally and and for the podcast, I create that the companies that I'm attached to as long as it's relevant to what the podcast are about are the distribution companies. Yeah.
James Dooley: So like on UK lead generation podcast I'm saying that fat rank is the distribution company and that then get creates a page on IMDb which is a really trusted signal and I can put same as schema and I can link through to the fat rank website and stuff like that. And then if you're writing a book, you can have that the company, whether it's Fat Rank or Promo Show or whatever other brands, business brands that I'm attached to. I could say, okay, that's the publisher
Craig Campbell: and then that's things. So, I'm just trying to find different ways of how I can connect those nodes together and those entities together to try to okay, that powers up that which powers up this and this is connected to that and stuff like that. And I think
James Dooley: it has very much changed a lot more into being like an entity based algorithm.
Craig Campbell: Yeah. It is like I obviously if anyone doesn't watch what Douly is doing, you see him cleverly getting people in podcasts and tie himself to those people in that industry. You know, I always joke, you know, you getting photographs with people and I'm like, I know you don't even like that guy. You get a photo for women. Uh like because I'm tying this and tying that and mentioning them in LinkedIn and you're like, "Ah, right. I see exactly what you're doing here." And I was only joking when I said don't like a guy but you're like he's not really your pal though. Do you know you're like you're not doing this just because you're all mate and you know you put up your Instagram post you're like ah
James Dooley: I see what you're doing here and you're joining all of those dots which obviously we know through Crunchbase you know LinkedIn profiles, social media profiles, IMDb and everything else. You connecting all of those entities together and tying yourself to other people in your industry. You know I know you're not friends with Neil Patel. Um, but would you have them in your podcast? You'd go, "Absolutely." And because you might have already had them on. I don't know if you have. So I go, "Right, I know you two are not m you know, you stay here and he's America. You're not boozing buddies, but why would you have them on?" One, he's got a massive following. I think he's a very smart guy. Two, and probably more importantly for you going, I'm tying me to him. Um, so, you know, for me from the outside looking in, I'm going that's what this motherfucker's doing.
Craig Campbell: Yeah.
James Dooley: Um, cleverly doing it by the way. Um, and I think
Craig Campbell: you can do that as well with businesses. You can like if you look up to a business and go, I want to be like them.
James Dooley: Mhm. You can with listicles and other things like that, you could be appending your entity to their entity which then starts within the vexa database and stuff like that that it starts to make you more and more closer and overlap with the company that you want to look like. I think it's key. I think connecting those nodes and stuff the entities together I think is is really really key for business branding. I think it's uh
Craig Campbell: and you've got to do it and it's a slog again. It's not just I I can't sit here and say
James Dooley: do it and you know you can do it for 200 quid a month. All of that stuff takes again time, effort, man hours, you know, just being in podcast with people that
Craig Campbell: you might not even have anything in common with and you're like, I need time myself with that person because they're a big player and
James Dooley: so so on that I've spoke about there like listicles and connecting yourself to other entities to build a personal to sorry to build a business brand or a corporate brand. Would you recommend the business owners to be doing press releases of let's say awards that they might have won, reviews or like that they've just had a record month and stuff like that for the business?
Craig Campbell: Absolutely. You know, especially in space, right? Um, we can't put out a press release going Dooley ranked another gen locksmith website or whatever. Press are not insight. No one's even interested in reading that pitch. So, you know, you have to make up stuff like record-breaking months or stuff that's a bit more newsworthy and more exciting. H even if you know it's inflated slightly or whatever, h I think, you know, you always want to I'm not saying do a press release every month or anything, but again, it's probably very very wise to do that and you just get brand mentions and everything else out there and and you know, I think all of these things are hugely important from a Google trust and ranking perspective as well. So, you know, saying you won awards, saying you've done this and saying you've done that is absolutely right thing to do, especially in an industry where there's not a huge amount of exciting newsworthy stuff that we do and you know, you bought an old red domain name, you've done some canonical abuse and done this and done that. It's not getting in the press and you obviously you don't want to tell people exactly what you're doing anyway. It has to come from what else can we say and in our industry it's a lot of awards and other
James Dooley: so I've got a contentious one like if one that could split decisions of being like what would you do here right so business owners looking and they're saying oh you you're chatting on about reviews testimonials which I can get even though they're hard to get from my existing customers I can get them on my Google business profile I can build that part out case studies I've got loads of case studies I can let before and after photos, attach the testimonial to that case study. Brilliant. I can build that part out. So, business owner says, "I can do all that. Not a problem." But awards, majority of industries don't have awards being given out willy-nilly. And just randomly in the post, you go and get a big trophy sent through going, "Well done, you're the best plumber in Manchester." Right? However, there's certain places where they might go and send you an email through and say, um, oh, we've got an awards night next Friday for a thousand pounds you can attend and you get five people and you get a meal and by the way, if you do buy this table, you win the best plumber in Manchester award. Should business owners be looking to do that? because we know the importance of awards and if you're not doing that then you're not winning the awards which then means for the part of reputation query fan out you don't tick that box I you know that's what the chambers of commerce do you know what I mean that's the exact pitch they give you and you know it's everyone who's paid for that table whether it be a grand or whatever that wins the awards they're just not telling you that you're going to win the award they they can't say that, but they're kind of seeing it. And you know, one from an SEO perspective, you're getting a nice link from a powerful website, which is obviously a good link that would cost you a couple hundred bucks anyway, but the the PR and the other stuff that all goes around about it, and the noise and social media and everything you create and the selfies at the awards and all that kind of proof that you were there and you actually won an award, even whether it's, you know, horseshit or not. Absolutely. And I think, you know, all of these things are important. Doesn't matter what industry you look at, you know, you've got the builders, the the SEOs, the, you know, whatever out there. And even like when it goes to sports at BBC personality of the year, the person that wins that every year's not got a personality arguably, but it's nice for them to have their day out and and, you know, everyone's spending a few quid and get nice new suits and get their selfies and their photographs and the red carpet. It's a day out. uh you know for people to get drunk h and network with our own sports buddies that you know that that awards not worth their otherwise but they're getting links they're getting pressed they're getting everything else that goes along with it and you're going to take it so it's no different really h from niche to niche so that that's kind of how I view it and sorry for any BBC sports personality people who might watch that you may see no that that's creme de la creme even the Ballon d'Or know they're not going to Dubai and and swanking about there and all that. I know they probably do care. There's a bit of ego involved in football, but realistic that's another piss up. Do you know what I mean? And you know, it's never the right guy that wins it, is it? Well, no one want Messi or Ronaldo, but it's always
Craig Campbell: debatable with some of the other guys that won. Well, that's got to be right. Somebody's somebody's slipped under a few B there or bought a bigger table or whatever it might be and got the award. So, I'm kind of sceptical on You would then for businesses though you would actually.
James Dooley: Yeah,
Craig Campbell: absolutely. I've done it.
James Dooley: Yeah,
Craig Campbell: I mean I think I think you have to. I think otherwise you don't get you're not getting the awards and it's it's not you that's done like they're basically saying we want you to attend by the way to have this table and by the way you've won this award. It's not you've not done anything wrong. It's the award. If anyone's done anything wrong, it's the award people that I
James Dooley: I tell you what, I'll go one step further. See, if there was no award in my industry, I would make one myself.
Craig Campbell: Yeah. I just to do the PR and get
James Dooley: I think it's needed. You need to get get your mum to award that you're the best SEO.
Craig Campbell: I don't even know she would agree with that, but nah, you see it happening and why not?
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyway, I hope you like the episode on business brands and is it important to grow out in 2026? There's another episode about is personal branding important in the blog section. Craig, it's been absolute pleasure.