With so many platforms available, it's quite easy to reach customers nowadays. However, what most brands ignore is the human touch. Even if you have the perfect solution to a customer's pain point, if the interaction comes across as impersonal, you'll lose the audience right there.
That's where the brand story comes into the limelight.
It's about forming a connection with your target audience using a narrative that tells your customers what your brand is all about. But how to make an impact with a story? Well! By introducing visual branding into your marketing strategy. But what about it?
Keep scrolling through!
What is visual branding?
Visual branding is about how the customers perceive your brand after looking at the marketing collateral posted by your brand on different platforms. Like the name is, it's about the visual identity that's associated with your brand.
It involves creating a consistent and cohesive visual language that communicates the brand's values, personality, and essence to the target audience. Consistency across all these elements helps establish a unified and powerful brand presence in the minds of consumers, fostering a sense of trust and loyalty.
To put it another way; it's about the elements that guide customers or clients towards your brand. For instance, it could be logos, colors, typography, or styles used. Since it sets the tone of your brand, you must create a visual brand identity that matches the overall identity.
Visual branding and AI
AI tools have entered the design space, allowing marketers and strategists to fasten and improve their visual branding processes.
For example, an AI logo maker can significantly boost your visual branding by providing a range of benefits and advantages that traditional logo design methods might not offer. AI logo makers can generate logos quickly, allowing you to create and iterate through different design options in a short amount of time.
But how do they work?
An AI logo maker works by leveraging AI algorithms to automate and assist in the logo design process. These algorithms are trained on vast amounts of design data and patterns to generate logos based on user input and design preferences to bolster visual branding.
You just need to provide the AI logo maker with initial input, usually your company name, industry, slogan (if applicable), preferred colors, and any design inspirations or styles you have in mind. This information helps the AI understand the context and requirements for your logo.
How to portray your brand's, unique story?
1) Understand your brand positioning
Before you get on with creating the brand personality, you need to understand your brand's positioning. It means that you must know about your customer base before determining the language, terms, and tone of your brand.
You can define your audience by researching the following areas:
- Age, gender, job profile, economic status, and education
- Interests, values, or hobbies
- Their lifestyle
- Their pain points
- Their favorite brands
2) Define your mission
Once you are through with that, the next step is to define the mission.
Take some time to assess how you will help your customers navigate the complexities of their daily lives. For instance, you must ask yourself things like:
- What do you provide the services?
- What do you hope to accomplish?
- Will you bring any improvement to your customer's life?
- Why is it important?
- What do you stand for?
This will help get all the information that will develop a unique brand story for your company. Now let's move on to the action part and what all you can do to achieve it.
3) Build a typographic brand mark / logo
First, tell us one thing. What do you think whenever you see a billboard with a swoosh? The same very instant you know it's from Nike, right? In the same way, if there is a half-eaten apple, you know it's an Apple product. That's the power of a logo.
It's a mark that helps customers associate themselves with a brand whether or not the name is mentioned. So you must work on creating a brand mark in the simplest form that triggers an emotional appeal and aligns with the brand's values and mission.
4) Decide on a color palette
Let's be honest. How do you differentiate between the two teams? It's the color of jerseys, right? Again, why do construction workers, and medical workers have work clothes? So that the people can distinguish them from the masses.
Similarly, color differentiates a brand from its competitors. Ideally, companies choose 1-3 primary colors with 2-3 secondary colors. But one can choose a single primary color. For instance, McDonald's is one of the world-renowned brands that use a single primary color with two secondary colors.
It would be good to understand color psychology before confirming the color of your brand and its visual elements. You can use different apps to create a strategy on your Mac for the same.
But creating a strategy, there might be times when you must start storing a load of information which after some time starts interfering with your system's storage. Hence, you may want to read this review to find the best Mac storage manager to avoid any hassles when creating a branding strategy.
Remember, creating an effective plan before execution will help you prevent any blunders during the final stage.
5) Use a consistent text shape and style
You can't always depend on the visual element to engage with your audience. The power of words is quite prolific. But if you are not consistent with the visual part of the content, you might break the uniformity or conformity of your brand's visual appeal.
So choose the ones that align with your company's personality and graphic elements and stick to the same family. Keep in mind that Mac and Windows don't have the same fonts. So choose the ones that are universal and engage with a wider audience.
6) Align images to your brand's voice
Whatever you do must create an emotional connection with your brand. What do you want your audience to think when they come across your brand?
Asking yourself such questions will help you create visuals that will resonate well with your customers. If you happen to achieve that, customers will surely share your posts on their social media platforms or other mediums.
Conclusion
Branding is about creating a unique brand story or image that will stay in the minds of the audience. And visual branding is one powerful way to achieve that. It includes four key elements, i.e., logo/ brand mark, typography, color, and visuals.
But there is one thing that's usually overlooked. What is that? Consistency. Yes, you heard it right. If you are not consistent with visual elements across all the marketing or sales collaterals, your company might lose relevance.
Let the customers establish a relationship with your visual branding and associate good things with it. It will help them trust your brand over the competitors more. Make sure to use the same set of visual elements for all the social media platforms to help the customers engage with your brand. Doing so will help you create a human connection that was otherwise not possible.
Eventually, if everything goes well, it will help you increase conversions and ROI. And more importantly, it will help you carve a place for yourself in the competitive market. And you will establish yourself as a market leader.
Isn't that what you hope for the moment you think of starting your own? Share your thoughts.
