For many customers in this age of social media, what you see is what you get. Brands have a split-second to make an impression on potential customers scrolling their feeds. This is why the visual component of your brand strategy is now more important than ever.
These days, a brand’s story, personality, vision, and message are not enough to bring flocks of customers to their door. To make a real impact on your target audience, you need to invest time, energy, strategy, and budget in your brand visuals.
Understanding visual brand identity’s importance
Your brand identity consists of all the elements that make you recognizable to your customers. This includes your brand’s mission statement, core values, voice, and personality. Your brand design integrates these ideas into concrete visual components such as color palette, typography, and graphic design.
Visual identity is a vital component of your brand identity. Like it or not, images are now the most powerful form of communication. You must ensure your visual identity represents you well and engages your target audience. This lets you create an emotional connection to your customers through the strategic deployment of your visual identity.
Your brand’s visual identity and representation extend beyond colors, typography, and design. To make an impact every time someone sees your ads, packaging, or any other brand paraphernalia, you need creativity, consistency, and, of course, uniqueness.
Your visual identity should:
- Have an emotional impact on your audience.
- Succinctly delivers information about your brand and the products or services you’re offering.
- Unifies all aspects of your brand.
Centering your audience
Every good marketing strategy has a strong foundation of thorough market research. Before anything else, you need to understand who your audience is and what they want. This way, all aspects of your brand strategy will be targeted on fulfilling those wants and needs.
Remember, none of this work is for you. It’s all for your audience, their preferences, and what you can do to engage them and convert them to paying customers.
Many brands and digital marketers make the mistake of centering their visual strategy on popular design trends. While a majority of people will always respond to something trendy, it should not be the focus of your strategy. Instead, you should center your target audience at all times.
Building a strong visual identity
A compelling brand identity knows how to appeal to your audience. Listed below are three features that define a strong visual identity:
1. Memorable: Starbucks, Apple, and Nike are just a few examples of brands that have become incredibly successful at building and maintaining their visual identity. With just one glance, everyone knows what product they’re looking at, with no need for any additional context.
Even small, local brands can have this impact without multimillion-dollar marketing budgets. With a bit of strategy and creativity, you can build a brand identity that’s just as memorable to your target audience.
2. Unique: More than anything, your visuals should stand out from the competition. You should research your direct competitors to see what they’re doing with their brand identity. Once you know what everyone else is doing, you can start working on how to be better.
3. Cohesive: Every aspect of your visual identity should be found on everything related to your brand, such as your website, social media profiles, internal communication, product packaging, and other paraphernalia.
Conclusion
Visual identity is essential to your overall brand strategy. It lets you make an immediate impact on your target audience and draw them in with one quick glance. You should focus on being memorable, unique, and the cohesion of all your marketing materials. If all of this sounds overwhelming to you, you need to hire the best digital advertising agency to help you out.
C/C/G is a marketing agency in Santa Monica, and we specialize in branding for all aspects of a company. We’re experts at building the brand architecture and creating internal guidelines to unify the brand across all channels and platforms. If you want impactful branding to create lasting connections with your customers, contact us today!