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In an overcrowded marketplace where consumers are bombarded with choices, a cohesive brand identity can guide them straight to you. A well-crafted brand identity powered by eye-catching visuals helps your audience recognize you, making your company memorable and trustworthy.
Think about it—are you more likely to follow (and buy from) a brand with disconnected, messy, all-over-the-place social media? Or a brand that is synchronized and organized throughout different social platforms?
Wondering how to create a cohesive brand identity on social media? Keep scrolling to find out.
What Is a Cohesive Brand Identity?
A cohesive brand identity refers to the consistent use of design elements that create a unified and recognizable image for a brand. This includes a harmonious colour scheme, logo, themes, illustration style, icons, typography, animation style, and overall aesthetic that reflects the brand’s values and tone.
Together, these elements form the foundation for your distinctive social media personality, thus connecting emotionally with the audience and nurturing trust in your product/service and content.
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Image source: Canva
How to Build a Cohesive Brand Identity on Social Media with Visuals
You need to set up specific visual guidelines before creating an unforgettable social media presence that “wows” users. Here are some simple steps to take when starting out:
1. Define Your Brand
Your social media identity reflects your brand. It should clearly depict what your brand is, what it cares about, what it does, and how you want to communicate your thoughts, messaging, and values.
To achieve this, define your brand purpose, personality, tone of voice, and messaging. This will help maintain consistency across channels and ensure your visuals hit the right note with all these.
Designing compelling visuals that appeal to your audience, especially on social media, requires more than creativity. You must follow specific (proven) fundamental principles to entice and engage the audience.
This includes:
- Contrast: Highlight the differences between various elements
- Repetition: A cohesiveness, a sense of rhythm in every post, story, and comment
- Hierarchy: Emphasizing the importance of different elements to make viewers focus on one over another
2. Brand Storytelling with Colours and Fonts
When used correctly, colours have the power to evoke different emotional responses. That’s why you should choose a colour palette that embodies your brand’s personality and messaging. Pay close attention to your target audience’s needs, challenges, and characteristics.
For example, men and women tend to have different colour preferences. Men prefer bolder colours like maroon or navy blue, while women respond better to softer colours like pink, green, and light blue.
Different social platforms also generate varied engagement for different colour palettes. A study done on Instagram colour palettes shows that three colours drive the most engagement on the platform:
- Rose Dawn
- Ethereal Blue
- Harvest Gold
Another study shows that the Facebook audience, on the other hand, loves bright, energetic shades—like orange, red, violet, and golden yellow.
However, whatever shades you choose, be consistent across all platforms—social media, website, and emails.
Image source: Canva
The same is true for your font choice. It should mirror your brand identity. Say you are a tech-savvy brand targeting leaders with a formal tone. Here, a sans-serif font can be an appropriate choice.
Following are some primary font categories you can draw up when designing your brand identity on social media:
- Sans-serif
- Serif
- Script
- Handwritten
- Slab serif
- Decorative
NOTE: Don’t get super creative with fonts. Choose something that the audience can easily read and understand.
3. Utilize Texture, Shapes, and Elements
Similar to colours and fonts, shapes and textures also help paint your brand’s specific picture in the audience’s mind.
Take, for example, Apple’s minimalist designs, which include clean lines and smooth textures. The company uses geometric shapes throughout its social channels, which perfectly complements its innovative, sophisticated, and user-friendly brand identity.
You should want to do the same. Add fun and creative social media content with animation instead of regular stock images. Use a mockup generator to customize all the aspects of your social media visuals. Integrate round shapes to trigger feelings of love and community or sharp shapes to evoke a sense of trust and stability.
However, don’t take this too far since it can leave the visuals feeling aloof and impersonal.
4. Incorporate your Visual Brand into Posts, Stories, and Mentions
Everything produced on social media should reflect your brand, which should be implemented in both external and internal content.
So, integrate the visual guide you created here in all your branding elements—from sales presentations and email signatures to internal Zoom backgrounds and newsletters.
Tips for Maintaining a Cohesive Brand Identity
Now, with the visual brand identity defined, you must ensure it stays cohesive across channels. Achieving this requires deliberate actions.
One way to do this is by appointing a visual identity owner. This person can be anyone from your team—a designer, marketer, social media manager, or even a third-party expert. The owner will work closely with your social media marketing and design team to ensure consistency across all channels. Here are some general tips.
Image source: Canva
Create a Brand Identity Guide
You need to communicate your brand identity across professionals and departments in your company. The key is creating a thorough style guide that details every element of your brand identity discussed above—colour palette, logos, and font painting.
Using PDF editing tools, create a brand identity document that complies with all the necessary information you need to make consistent social media content. Allow your teams to collaborate on the document with comments, annotations, and revision tracking to keep the guide updated.
Make sure your brand identity and style guides complement each other and are accessible to every team, from marketing to sales, customer service, and design.
Create Templates for Your Different Social Media Channels
Templates make creating social media content easier. Therefore, with your visual brand identified and ready, ensure it stays cohesive across different social platforms. This will speed up the process and make you easily recognizable to your audience.
Not everything you post requires templates, but consider it wherever possible. Here are two beginner-friendly design tools to help you out:
- Canva: Canva is your one-stop solution for all graphic design needs. It allows you to create graphics, social media posts, stories, banners, infographics, and more.
- Unsplash: Download high-quality photos free of charge for commercial and non-commercial use with absolutely no permission needed.
Create An Unforgettable Brand Identity With The Influence Agency
We’ve laid everything out for you—all you need to create memorable visuals on social media to elevate your brand identity and leave a lasting impression. Now, put all that you’ve learned into practice, and soon, your engagement and conversion rates will shoot off the roof.
Better yet, leave the hard work to us! Our award-winning creative experts at The Influence Agency can create cohesive visuals that perfectly connect your brand to the right audiences across various platforms and mediums.
Contact us today and let’s turn your brand’s visual concepts into reality!