A SIMPLE GUIDE TO CREATING A SUCCESSFUL VISUAL BRAND ON SOCIAL MEDIA
One of the most common digital marketing challenges for new businesses and organizations is creating a consistent, recognizable, and exciting social media visual brand- especially if you’re not a designer. Even if you don’t have a logo and full brand design, social media is an important beginning step to connecting with an audience and creating a successful social media presence.
Let’s talk through a few simple steps to make your branded social media content professional, engaging, and effective in helping you reach your goals and your ideal audience.
(P.S.- I created the brand featured in this post and highlighted it as a project! Check it out here.)
Step 1) Look at templates and samples for inspiration and make a mood board.
No creative pursuit comes from thin air- looking at other people’s work for inspiration is an incredibly important first step to any design project! Canva is a vital design resource (especially for social media posts), and they have tons of templates, elements, and styles to check out. Pinterest is another great place to go- creating a board and checking out related suggestions can lead you down a lot of interesting paths to help you decide what works best for your brand.
Step 2) Create a basic brand board.
The next step to any consistent brand is to choose the branding basics- colors and fonts.
There are endless theories on the effects of color choices on brand perception, but the simplest rule is this- choose a light (white or something equivalent), a dark (black or something equivalent), and at least 3 other colors varied in their depth. You want your palette to mean something for your brand, and have enough contrast difference that you can layer your colors with backgrounds and fonts and still be able to read the words. Check out color palette generators on Canva or from services like Coolors, or find pre-chosen branded palettes on Pinterest.
For fonts, it’s important to choose a bolder title font and a simpler body text font. Fonts tell a lot about a business or organization, so choosing the right ones can make a huge difference to the message you send every time you make a post. Do you want your brand to be vintage-inspired or bold and modern? Simple and technical or fashion-forward and fresh? You can check out this guide from Canva, use a service like Fontpair, or find free or low-cost font downloads from places like Google Fonts or Creative Market. But be aware- not all fonts will be available to you on the design or word-processing software you use, so try to stick to what’s available where you’re at if you choose to use a service like Canva.
Step 3) Choose and use similar elements.
To keep a consistent and recognizable theme to your social brand, it’s important to focus on using similar shapes and elements to unify your posts together. There are a lot of different options to choose from, but it's a good first step to focus on choosing a basic shape or two, deciding whether decorative elements will be photography-based or cartoon/illustrations, and considering whether background patterns will be part of your regular content.
Will you use squares and rectangles with sharp or rounded corners? Will you use gradients or patterns or have solid color backgrounds? Will stars or hearts or triangles or polka dots be used as decoration? Will you use thick or thin lines as outlines, or none at all?
Step 4) Think about how things are placed and oriented.
Another important part of social media design and branding is the orientation and placement of your elements and text. This is a really important part of brand perception, and making a few conscious choices can make all the difference to appearing professional, intentional, and meeting your goals on social media.
Aligning all of your text to the left gives a more modern and technical feel to your content, while aligning text to the center is a great way to make your brand appear authoritative and bold.
Spacing is also important- spacing between lines of text, spacing between elements, and spacing content from the edges of the canvas. In my experience, content looks more professional if you make sure there is empty space around your design and your lines of text are less than double spaced (as seen above!).
Step 5) Focus on balance with colors, photographs, and videos in your posting schedule.
When you’re designing for social media, the big picture is just as important as the little one. It’s vital to consider what your social grid will look like as a whole- you don’t want 5 or 6 photographs in a row, followed by a few branded designs in the same colors, and a haphazard commitment to the visual brand you worked so hard to create.
There’s no one-size-fits-all rule to this issue, but if you used one particular color as the background of a few recent posts, it’s time to put another color into the rotation to create an overall familiar feel to your branded content and use all of the colors, fonts, and elements that make up your brand’s visual identity. Mix it up with designs, photos, and videos to keep things interesting and make them seem intentional. Success on social media is a marathon, not a sprint!
Step 6) Create your own templates for consistency and ease.
Not every post you’ll need to make will work with pre-made, branded templates, but there are a few categories that will come up regularly that can be pre-planned for consistency and ease. This depends a lot on what your business and goals are, but in my experience, the most common posts in this category include: quotes, news stories, and event or sale announcements.
I know from my own design career that one of the hardest parts of designing anything is staring at a blank white page and deciding where to begin. Make your design process easier and more efficient by creating a few templates that allow you to easily make a copy, plug in the relevant info, and post ASAP.
