One of the benefits of visual content is that it helps with reinforcing your branding. When planning any visuals, branding is an essential consideration.

A company’s brand is the image it creates in the minds of its audience. This is done through the business conveying its personality, and using consistent design elements. These design elements tell the audience that this content, without a doubt, comes from this particular company. It’s easy to recognize.

There’s more to branding than just visuals, but for our purposes here, we’ll discuss some ways you can add branding to your visual content to increase engagement and its effectiveness.

Identifying Brand Elements

Brands use the same colors, design features, imagery, words, and phrases to create a consistent experience for their audience. Your audience sees these same design elements each them and then they know it’s you. They come to expect these visual elements and they give your brand consistency.

When considering branding design elements, keep in mind your company’s unique sales proposition or company mission. Your branding should harmonize with these core aspects of your business.

First, define the elements that will create your brand identity. These could include:

• Logos – You can include your logo somewhere on your visual content.
• Colors – Certain colors or a color scheme that is used to show people it’s you
• Fonts – Particular fonts you consistently use
• Layout – A regular layout or theme
• Framing or borders – Distinctive framing
• Style – A style such as casual, formal, business-like, hip, or vintage

These elements might be a small part of your visual content, but they can have a big impact. The colors you use, for example, evoke certain emotions. Some fonts look whimsical or comical, while others are formal or make your business look trustworthy.

Applying Brand Elements

There are many ways to incorporate these brand elements into your visuals. You can put a small logo in the corner of your images. You can use the same or a similar border for each inspirational quote you create. Branding elements can also be included in the descriptions of your visual content posted on social media, such as a catchphrase or hashtag.

You can get some ideas on how to incorporate brand elements into your visual content by looking at the research you did earlier. Which design elements did your audience like best? For example, you may find that they respond to certain color schemes more than others. You can also look at the research you did on competitors.

Try to choose visual elements that you can use for each and every piece of content. Branding works best when it’s consistent. Branding elements you can use on all content will be the most consistent.

You don’t have to completely decide everything now. What’s important is to keep in mind branding elements as you go about choosing or creating visual content. Once you start publishing visual content, you can then see which elements performed best.