Visual branding is one of the key assets when it comes to presenting yourself to your audience. This way you are letting them know who you are and how they should perceive you. Let’s say that your page has a whole bunch of photos from your office showing how everything works behind the scenes, this will tell your visitors that you pay a lot of attention to making your employees satisfied. Or, if you use a lot of images of nature, along with some motivational quotes, your audience will see you as someone who wants to encourage and inspire others. The fact that images say a lot is why Instagram has become so popular as a business platform.
Basically, it is essential that you use visuals in order to present abstract ideas to your audience. Nothing shows what kind of a business you are better than the visuals that you implement and incorporate. It’s also all about color and font choices, text size, and the general feeling that your design brings about. Not only is all this essential for presenting your brand, it is also an area where you mustn’t make the wrong choices, as they will make your brand look unprofessional and leave a bad taste in the mouth of a visitor who comes to you hoping they would find a solution.
Here are 3 things to keep in mind when trying to visually improve your brand:
1. Make an emotional connection with your audience
One of the essential ways of leaving an impression on your users which is going to last more than a day is to make an emotional connection with them. If you manage to do this properly, you will actually make them find pleasure in commenting on, liking, and sharing your content. This is where visuals kick in. The fact is that people are visual beings, and this kind of stimulation is what they respond to the most. So, if you present your users with images that will affect them, they will make the association between that emotion and your brand, and become loyal to you.
There are various visual elements that incite either positive or negative emotions. These are color, words, texture, style, shape, and usability. For example, if you focus on using symmetrical elements in your images, people will perceive a sense of order. On the other hand, if you focus on the opposite, you will incite feelings of uneasiness and chaos. If you are aiming at making people feel optimistic and happy, then you should think about using warm colors such as yellow, red, and orange. There is also the difference between close-up photos and those taken from a distance. The former feels more intimate, while the latter incites a feeling of isolation.
What you need to know is that happiness is the main factor which makes people share your content on social media networks. Therefore, you should focus on inciting this emotion and making your content go viral as a result.
“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos
2. Visuals are everything
As we have ascertained, visuals are essential when it comes to your brand. An important feature of your visuals needs to be consistency. You want your users to feel like they have a relationship with a coherent brand, not a disconnected mess which they don’t know how to relate to.
Make sure that all your channels equally represent who you are. For starters, pick a color palette that is going to be unique to your brand design. Everything starts with your logo image. The way that it is colored and designed is going to impact the rest of your images and other design elements. Every post that you share should contain a color that brings your logo in mind. For example, Coca-Cola focuses on red and white, and you will notice that all of their posts include these colors.
When talking about your logo, it is essential that it is the same on every network that you use. It’s a representation of your company, and generally, the first thing that comes to mind when people think about your business. So be consistent, and make it memorable.
As for your images, consistency comes down even to using the same filters. If every photo has a different filter, your content will seem like it doesn’t really have a proper organization, and it will feel like your brand is a visual mess. Determine which filters fit your images the most, and then stick to them.
3. Use a different kind of visual for different audiences
Consistency is essential, but it doesn’t mean that you cannot use different kinds of visual elements in order to attract different kinds of audiences. Determine which kind of content works the best for a particular product or service that you are offering. Cause, in the end, different people prefer different forms of visual content. It can be photos, GIFs, infographics, macros, comics, videos, slideshows, quote cards, graphical data, memes, etc. Post them on different social networks and determine which are best suited for each platform according to the response.
“Social media is about sociology and psychology more than technology.” – Brian Solis
So, as you have realized by now, your visual brand identity is more than just the images you use. It is, in fact, the sum of all your visual elements put up together for your audience to see. When they are grouped like this, they tell a story about who you are. What is essential is that this story can either acknowledge what your core values are or hinder them. Remember to remain consistent throughout all your channels, as if your brand is a single person dealing with all your users.
