Clarity and consistency are two of the most important factors in developing a memorable, recognised, and recommended brand. Regardless of your sector or company, if you want to brand your website, blog, and social media accounts, you must keep these two aspects in mind, particularly in terms of visual branding.
Clarity
When you’re clear on what you stand for, who you serve, what you do best, why you’re the greatest option, how you’re unique, and what outcomes and advantages people will experience by interacting and engaging with you, marketing and sales become virtually straightforward. Even better, referrals may grow considerably if your audience knows who you are.
Consistency
When your brand appears consistently throughout all marketing channels in the same manner – with the same colours, fonts, imaging style, and message – you generate immense brand equity, which results in improved trust, credibility, and dependability.
When messaging and visuals are inconsistent, it is difficult for companies to get traction in the marketplace. This inconsistency makes it harder for consumers to recall or identify the brand, thereby hindering company expansion. Consistent visual iconography is essential for establishing brand clarity.
Brands without clarity and consistency can be seen as disorganised and untrustworthy.
Before we go into the specifics of these ideas, let’s analyse why visual imagery has such a significant influence on your business.
Visual Branding Is Crucial
It has been shown that visual imagery increases audience engagement and social sharing. According to the Content Marketing Institute.
- Visual material receives 94% more views than text-only content.
- If you publish a blog article and include photographs, 35 percent more people will share it.
- Sixty-six percent of social media postings are photographs or include images.
- You should include at least one picture every 350 words in your articles.
Every day, millions of photos are posted on blogs and social media, making it more important than ever to brand your visual content and images to stand out. Branding your social media and blog photos may seem laborious and time-consuming. You hardly have time to produce fresh blog posts and post frequently on social media, and you don’t need to add anything more to your list of responsibilities. But believe me, it need not be difficult.
Benefits Of Visual Branding
A visual design plan is essential for developing a powerful brand. By making the effort to brand your website and photos and creating a consistent look and feel for how your business appears in the world, you increase the potential effect and influence of your postings on your audience and prospective customers. Among the advantages provided by branded pictures are the following:
- Individuals will readily identify your brand.
- Your audience is more likely to remember your material.
- People are more inclined to recommend businesses your way if they identify and remember your brand.
- You will get along better with your audience if they can relate to your images, care about what you have to say, and see themselves in you.
- The addition of polish and professionalism increases credibility and confidence.
Branding Images For Social Media And Blogs
From your website and blog to social media and print marketing materials to in-person meetings and networking, every engagement and experience a person has with your company influences their perception of your brand.
Today, a person’s first engagement with your business is often a social media post that includes an eye-catching picture.
In addition to being professional and well-designed, your social media and blog photos must also reflect your brand’s personality, beliefs, and message. Branded photos may assist in expanding your reach, increasing website traffic, attracting new prospects and customers, and boosting recommendations. However, you must first ensure that the implementation of your brand’s imagery is consistent.
Here are ten easy ways to brand your website, blog, and social network graphics so that people can recognise your brand more quickly.
Add A Logo Or Icon
Add your logo to every picture you publish online to quickly associate it with your business. The challenge is to show the logo in a way that makes it clear that it belongs to you without being too busy.
Create a tiny, basic, one-color version of your logo that may be included at the bottom of the photos in both white and black. Always include the logo in the same location, if feasible, for aesthetic consistency.
Incorporate A Watermark
In other cases, such as when producing a featured picture for a blog post, adding a logo to an image might be unnecessary clutter. Consider applying a watermark in these instances.
Your watermark might be an emblem, logo, or supporting design element. What the watermark is is less important than its presence and consistent application across all photos.
Provide Images That Follow A Specific Theme
Whether you shoot your own photographs or use stock images, the style and sort of images you use must have a theme. Every picture used to represent and promote your brand, including background images, blog post featured images, infographic images, presentation slides, brochure images, and social media posts, must have the same aesthetic. This means you shouldn’t use a harsh, single picture of a device one day and a soft, feminine picture of a woman in a green field the next.
If your images are disorganised and inconsistent, your audience will not be able to identify your branded material easily.
Decide thus what sentiments and emotions you want your brand to portray, what personality your brand has, what types of photos best represent your business, and which photographs will connect most with your audience. Will you avoid displaying your face? Will just action photos be used? Are all of your photographs taken outside? Once you have made a choice, you should adhere to it.
Employ Brand Colors
Colors are readily identifiable, communicate emotion, and arouse interest. Strong, memorable businesses employ the same colours throughout their logo, print marketing materials, signage, website, social media visuals, blog posts, and presentation decks – their core brand colours.
Your brand style guide should provide your major brand colours and secondary support colours, as well as the Pantone, RGB, CYMK, and Hex codes for each hue. This guarantees that all content creators for your brand will use the same colour scheme.
I normally identify two major brand colours and one accent or action colour when building brands. This provides me with one colour for headings, one colour for callouts and special content, and one colour for actionable elements such as buttons and links.
You may increase the memorability of your brand’s pictures in a manner similar to that of large corporations by adhering to your brand’s colour palette and providing further visual consistency.
Add A Design Element
Consider including a design element exclusive to your brand in your picture. This might be a solid colour block, a pattern or texture, a shape, an overlay, a border or line, or a swirl of uniform colour.
The idea is to choose a design feature that your audience will encounter across your website, business card, marketing materials, presentations, and social media. When the design element is consistently coupled with your content, brand identification will occur more quickly. And the more often it occurs, the longer your brand will be remembered.
Employ Consistent Fonts
The way you use typography in your marketing materials is as important as the fonts you use. You should have one or two core typefaces or type families that show off your brand.
Use only the fonts listed in the style guide for your brand when making photos with text or quotes for blog posts and social media posts.
Similarly, be consistent in your usage of each font. For instance, when generating a “quote picture,” use one font for the quotation and another for the credit, and apply the same style to every “quote image” that you post.
When building brands for my clients, I usually choose one type family for the body text, one type family for the headings, and one accent or fun font for shout-outs and unique material that adds personality and flare. Three type options (often one script font, one serif font, and one sans serif font) also give customers more creative freedom when making images for blog posts and social media.
Add A Colour Layer
A semi-transparent layer of colour applied on top of an image constitutes an overlay. If you adhere to your brand’s colour scheme, an overlay transforms a generic stock picture into a branded image instantaneously.
While “quote pictures” are popular, they may be among the most difficult to design. Overlays are also the quickest approach to improving the legibility of text on a picture since they provide a more uniform backdrop for the text.
Make It Monochromatic
Using black-and-white graphics is a quick and simple approach to distinguishing your brand if everyone else in your niche uses colour images.
Insert A Filter
Photo filters are preset photo effects that may be applied to photographs to give them a particular atmosphere or appearance. Filters may transform a drab skyline into a vivid dawn, oddly coloured foods into a delectable dinner, and a mundane still life into an artistic masterpiece. Picture filters automatically change all of the parameters, so even amateur photographers and do-it-yourselfers can make photos that look like they were taken by a professional.
Do you like vivid hues, increased contrast, a lens flare, or a vintage or retro appearance? Are you seeking to reach women or men? Do your graphics need to be bold and robust or delicate and feminine? There is a corresponding filter.
To give your branded photographs a little more oomph, search for a filter that best reflects your personality and message.
This filter will become your brand, and you should use it on every picture you take to make sure they all look the same.
Develop Templates
Creating customised social media photos, featured images for blog posts, and all the other images your company needs may be a difficult undertaking. However, there is one thing you can do to speed up and simplify the process: establish a library of templates.
A collection of master image layouts and designs is a “template library.”
Creating a library of templates for your branded photos in advance enables you to specify precisely how future branded images should be made. In addition, templates enable the establishment of brand image standards and norms for others to follow. When building your collection of image templates, think about templates for long quotes, short quotes, blog articles, calls-to-action, special features, sales, expert positioning, and general “feel-good” brand images.
A Collection of Images
The most essential thing to remember when generating branded photos for your website, blog, and social media presence is to maintain consistency among your images. If someone collected all of the photographs that your brand has posted or shared over the last month, they should all seem cohesive, as if they belonged to the same family.
The process of creating brand images does not have to be difficult.
This article discusses ten distinct graphic techniques for branding your photographs. That does not imply you must utilise all 10 alternatives for your photographs; review the list again and choose one or two (or maybe three) that work best for you and your business.
Uncertain about the appropriate image branding solutions for your business? You cannot choose between using a filter or an overlay, a logo or a watermark. Conduct research. Pinterest and Instagram are ideal for brand image research.
Search for a term relevant to your expertise and observe the results. What captures your interest? What makes you feel good? What photos urge you to search for similar ones?
Consider the styles that feel pleasant and connect with your brand. Save some of the possibilities that best reflect your idea on a hidden board or in a private file for design inspiration, and then return to this list of strategies to see which ones connect with the photos you discovered.
Once you have determined the style and feel of your brand’s pictures, maintain consistency.
We recognise that, after time, you may tyre of generating photos with the same appearance and feel. It is typical. But don’t use your tiredness as an excuse to change things, because the moment you start to feel bored, your brand is gaining traction. While you view your photographs every day, your audience only sees them sometimes, interspersed with other content.
Remember that you cannot just use any picture you find online for your branded material, particularly if you’re using Google Images. To avoid possible copyright violations and lawsuits, it is important to only use photos that you have permission to use and to follow any attribution rules.
