Branding
Our Advice
A brand is more than a logo or set of colors, and it’s so much more than a cover photo. A brand is how you make your customers feel, and it’s built by taking a consistent approach across every interaction they have with your brand. We’ve written this guide to help you uncover strategies to ensure a consistent brand across multiple social media networks.
1.Cover your basics
Basic branding – make sure that you have a consistent logo, color palette, bio, boilerplate and handle. Once you’ve got the basics of branding your social profiles down, then you’re able to move on to more intermediate strategies. Even your basic branding strategy should be audited and updated quarterly. Branding your social media presence takes time and like your posting schedule, will need consistency, forward thinking and focus to implement.
Action steps
Perform a social media audit across all of your accounts
Ensure logos, banners, bios, posting cadences and handles are consistent with your brand guidelines, and audit regularly.
Make sure you’re posting on a consistent schedule consistently and that your content aligns with the look and feel of the branding you’ve established.
2.Extend your visual branding
So now that you have a consistent visual brand across network accounts, it’s time to enhance that even further. Make sure you have the same colors and fonts reflected in your images, graphics and videos. When someone visits your Instagram page, is the filter or pop of color immediately apparent to them? When a video is published, are the overlay text fonts similar to those that you use for your blog post’s featured image?
Over time, your customers will see the consistency in posts and begin to recognize when a post is from you without seeing your brand’s logo or social media handle.
Action steps
Write out your visual brand guide to include fonts, their uses and colors.
Create graphic templates for the same type of announcement (e.g. new product announcement has a similar font, color and design)
Create photos and videos that keep your brand’s aesthetic and color choices in mind. The posts should flow seamlessly into each other.
3.Develop your marketing personas
Your marketing personas are going to vary between the networks. Audiences on TikTok are younger than audiences on Facebook. This is the reality and if you use the same content across both networks, it’s possible that it won’t resonate the same way. To this end, it’s best to create multiple personas for your own marketing efforts.
Start with the company’s customer base and then map them to the different social media networks you use. For example, your Twitter account could target millennial parents while your Instagram account targets small business owners. Having these established personas per network helps you narrow down your content ideas and maybe even adjust your voice.
Action steps
Create multiple marketing personas and assign the social media networks that match
Examine your networks’ different demographics or set up listening queries if you need to get to know your audience
Create content to match the personas
4.Establish your brand voice & tone
After visuals, captions and related copy are the next important piece of branding. Company social media accounts tend to have some personality. For some, it’s sarcastic or snarky and for others, it’s informative. You might already have a brand voice established for your other marketing focuses. Extending that to social media, and cultivating a specific approach by social platform, is highly recommended.
Action steps
Fully develop and write out your voice and tone guide. Better yet, use social media listening to validate some of your writing style decisions.
Audit your own social media posts to see where you can improve in voice and tone
Share the guide and educate teams that write copy. being able to hyper-focus your branding, cater to a specific audience and serve up relevant content.
Our Appoach
1. We will create or audit your current branding across all your business and develop it.
2. Create or evaluate your customer & marketing persona’s
3. Create or evaluate your branding/styling guidelines – Colours, Fonts, Tone and Voice.
4. We will create a framework how the brand can be creative and relevant but still adhering to the branding and styling guidelines.
5. We will audit the business’s near competition and evaluate if there is any success that we can transfer into the business’s branding strategy.