Building a powerful brand identity is a multi-faceted process that goes far beyond the brand’s personality or its tone of voice. From the initial building blocks that encompass its vision and personality all the way to its visuals and dissemination across the web, building a compelling brand is a challenging task.
At the center of it lies its unique visual identity and the visual content you create to support the brand post-launch.
Everything from social media videos to website content and the graphics and images you put in your newsletters, visual content is one of the most compelling types of content for modern audiences.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you can craft, monetize, and disseminate great visual content to grow your brand effectively in 2023 and beyond.
Work With Professionals In The Field
First and foremost, we need to talk about talent sourcing as well as outsourcing in the brand-building process. This is especially important when we’re talking about visual content because quality visuals demand professional guidance, ideation, and creation.
You can get an in-house branding team to create the brand’s visual identity and work on ongoing content creation, or you can outsource to offset some of the overheads. Typically, it’s a more cost-effective solution to work with digital creative agencies on branding projects and for creating visuals on a per-need basis.
This allows you to direct your resources toward other departments without retaining a full branding team in-house.
However, whether you are working with an in-house team or an agency, the first and most important step is to invest in talent. Brand managers, visual artists, writers, and creatives, are the people you need to bring your brand’s elements and visuals to life.
Pro tip: If you don’t have the budget to hire in-house teams, consider outsourcing your content marketing to cover the key aspects of growing your business:
- Content strategy;
- Content creation;
- SEO and link building;
- Design compelling graphics that follow your brand identity.
Benefit of hiring an agency that covers both written and visual content is achieving brand consistency and ensuring brand recognition. Aligning all content types with your mission and values is the path to establishing a powerful and growing brand.
Design Your Unique Brand Identity
Speaking of your brand’s identity, one of the most important factors of long-term success in any industry and niche is having a compelling visual brand that captivates and engages people.
Developing a visual identity for your brand means that you’ll have a unique brand style and unique assets that you’ll be able to integrate into all your online and offline communications.
This is crucial for brand consistency and will make your brand recognizable across platforms. A big part of creative branding includes market and competitor analysis, which will tell you where you need to take your own visuals to stand out from the crowd.
In order to create a compelling visual brand, you will need to:
- Conduct audience and competitor analysis
- Understand the trends in your niche
- Create a unique personality and brand voice
- Define your mission, vision, and values
- Define your unique color scheme
- Choose a typeface that fits your brand
- Create visual assets like icons and pictograms
Always keep in mind that your brand identity needs to embody the purpose of your business, as well as the unique processes, methods, and traits that define your work. For example, professionals that are delving into life coaching should weave their unique coaching methodology into their visual content – website elements, social media posts, blog content, YouTube videos and more.
This allows them to create brand voice across the board and truly connect with their audience. It also helps with brand stickiness, meaning that people will have an easier time remembering the brand.
Harness The Power of User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) has become a powerful tool for building trust, authenticity, and engagement around your brand.
This form of content is created by your customers, fans, and followers and can include images, videos, reviews, testimonials, and more. Leveraging UGC can be a game-changer when it comes to crafting compelling visual content for your brand.
Start by encouraging your customers to create and share content related to your products or services. This can be achieved through social media campaigns, contests, or simply by asking for their feedback and showcasing it on your website or social platforms. Offer incentives such as discounts, exclusive access, or even recognition to motivate your audience to contribute.
Highlight customer stories, showcase their experiences with your products, and let their authentic voices shine through. Visual UGC adds a layer of credibility to your brand and demonstrates that real people are benefiting from your offerings.
Moreover, engage with your audience through comments, likes, and shares of their UGC. This not only encourages more user-generated content but also helps build a sense of community around your brand. When your customers feel heard and valued, they are more likely to become brand advocates.
Furthermore, you can use reviews as social proof and integrate them as a part of your visual content strategy.
If your product or service is not the most exciting to put into an image or video, or you don’t have the budget for fancy video ads, you can make screenshots of the real reviews your customers leave for you online and build brand trust by reposting those on your social media channels.
Nurture two-way communication with your customers and ask them for feedback regularly. After that, you can use a simple screenshot tool software for Windows to capture the core of your brand value and share it with your audience.
Leverage AI For Ideation and Content
Generative AI has flooded the online world in recent years and has become a staple in the business world, fuelling creative processes, answering questions, and automating tasks. In branding and creating visuals for your brand, generative AI can play an important role in helping you minimize costs while maximizing efficiency and output.
Some of the best AI platforms out there have a free AI writer that not only can generate great written content but can take content ideation to the next level. And that’s where the power of generative AI truly lies–in the ideation process.
Start by using AI writing tools to support your content strategy and get your blog running. You can use AI to generate relevant topic ideas for your written content, but you can also use it to generate ideas for your visuals, along with explanations and step-by-step guides. You can then input that information into AI tools specializing in visual content creation to give them detailed prompts.
In addition to enhancing your online brand, AI tools can also play a significant role in crafting distinctive in-person experiences for your customers. For instance, when organizing an event, you can create personalized experiences for each attendee by utilizing an AI photo booth platform.
This custom-branded UGC tool enables you to transform attendees’ images into captivating visuals, adding a unique touch to their event experience.
Weave Your Brand Into Video and Image Ads
Last but not least, it’s important to note that advertising is one of the most powerful brand dissemination tools in your arsenal.
You can use all of the brand elements you create to enrich your video and image ads and make them truly unique across platforms, including your YouTube channel and social media.
When you’re publishing product announcements and video ads on social media, make sure that you’re using your unique brand elements. Ad creation tools will allow you to weave your typeface into the ad along with other important visuals, speaking in the brand’s tone of voice, and integrating your colors, icons, and templates.
Over time, your video editors and ad designers can develop a unique style to make your ads even more recognizable on social media and across video-sharing platforms.
Furthermore, you can level up your online merchandising to create an on-brand store. On online platforms such as Shopify, you can even design a window according to the ongoing demand and gain full control of your brand representation on every platform.
Over To You
Visual content is the foundational pillar that keeps your brand alive and relevant in a saturated market. From static content to dynamic visuals and enticing videos, there’s a lot you can do to spark imagination, inspire action, and guide your customers toward a purchase with good visuals.
Be sure to use these tips to start creating better visual content while at the same time monetizing it to help boost your brand and maximize your chances of success.
