Have you ever found yourself scrolling through an influencer or content creator's Instagram page, immersed by the attractiveness and aesthetic real-life appearance and composition of their posts? It feels as if you never want to leave their page and simply continue scrolling further– in many cases, causing viewers to follow or subscribe to see similar content on their feed cyclically.
That’s why the most essential factor you must take into account when initiating online marketing is effectively representing your brand on social media. Curating a cohesive, targeted, and visually-appealing feed will boost brand recognition among your audience–leading to familiarity and trust.
Visual Aesthetic
According to Hootsuite, “Your Instagram aesthetic is the first thing potential customers will notice when they check out your brand’s profile. The colors, layout, tone, and overall feeling of your Instagram page contribute to an aesthetic that can either gain you a new follower — or send them running.”
Selecting a color palette, projecting an aesthetic, using a recognizable logo, and forming a specific attitude of expression are all aspects which compose and collaborate with the sense of branding. These aspects are what create your brand’s identity and set it apart from others in a consumer’s mind.
Defining a branding strategy is naturally the initial phase in refining a marketing strategy. Branding encompasses anything from distinctive logos to your company's colors, written language styles, the content you create, the photographs you post on social media, and more.
Establishing brand guidelines is a useful first step. To begin, determine which specific colors to use across all your content and document them on a brand board– or a written document with your business’ graphic style guidelines. Then, determine the font(s) for your website and social media graphics.
Canva offers a free subscription that includes a wide choice of fonts, graphics, colors, and templates to help you produce visually amazing content without any design expertise. Most of these designs are also customizable, allowing users to alter original graphics with their own fonts, colors, and visuals. This enables users to modify pre-made designs that fit their own brand's aesthetic.
Unsplash is a website that allows users to search and download royalty-free and readily usable stock images that are free of charge for commercial and non-commercial purposes with no permission required. This is a great platform for small businesses that can’t afford to hire their personal photographers or obtain image licensing.
Using consistent images and brand colors throughout each photo on your feed is essential. By simply glancing at your feed, viewers should be able to recognize what your brand offers. In your branding and marketing initiatives, color is essential in developing a strong coherent visual brand design for your feed. Choose 2-3 colors and alternate between them throughout your feed, using light and dark hues for contrasting visuals.
Content
Brand buckets are another way to refer to content themes that your brand is known for. In other words, a crossover between what your brand is and how they are represented to the public.
Generating five to nine brand buckets can display various parts of your brand in an engaging way for your audience. Brand buckets can be anything from upcoming events and behind-the-scenes to inspirational quotes, FAQs, best sellers, and more. Establishing your brand buckets can help in designing a consistent content layout for social media.
Another one of the most essential steps when building a social media page is to include all information in the correct areas. It is important to provide consumers with all information necessary, which can be accomplished by including a Linktree on your social media page.
A Linktree allows users to place all essential links to critical landing pages– like your website or other social media accounts– under one individual link (say link one more time…). This allows consumers easy access to any information sources they might be seeking and empowers business owners to include all relevant landing pages in one specific location.
The last thing a brand wants is a potential consumer who is unable to learn more about your brand by not having the ability to reach the assets necessary.
Brands should also have the same profile photo on all social media platforms so your brand is easily identifiable to consumers.
But remember, while the appearance and feel of your profiles should be consistent and transferrable, you should customize your content to the demands of each platform.
Maintaining a uniform brand image throughout all of your company's social media platforms is critical, but that doesn't imply posting the same content on all of them. You want to add value to each of your social media profiles, whether they are on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or TikTok. Each page should have a distinct offering that keeps different demographics of the audience engaged and interested in following you.
On Facebook and LinkedIn, you'll want to focus on conversation-starting, instructional content rather than visuals. However, Instagram is primarily a highly visual, photo-based platform. Thus, you should emphasize the visual components of your company and truly focus on your image. TikTok should be utilized to interact with consumers in an engaging and original way through video content rather than for commercial purposes. Finally, Twitter may be utilized to respond to immediate questions and provide
rapid information.
Consistency
Finally, scheduling a reliable posting schedule is significant in upholding stability and consistency for your brand's followers. The last thing you want is for followers to notice you only post a few times a month on unplanned days. This may lessen their engagement with your brand– pointing toward the importance of reliability and consistency.
Maintain the pattern through all your marketing strategies, including print, press releases, website, and social media. Having a consistent design throughout your brand will simplify the process for your consumers and help them become familiar with your brand, which is precisely how potential viewers become customers.
When developing a social media publishing schedule, determine what hours and days of the week your potential and existing clients will be most active. This may be determined by industry research as well as by trying out various posting schedules and analyzing the engagement data between the various categories.
A Content Calendar is a terrific approach to ensure that the content you publish on your channels is consistent. A Content Calendar is a single document in which you and your team stay on top of when, where, and how specific content items will be published. It can assist in keeping a record of all the content that has to be released– from social media visuals to blog entries, updates, articles, and more– while tracking success via engagement analytics.
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