Nailing Your Visual Brand

"Don't judge a book by it's cover"

As much as we want this to be true, we know that customers are quick to judge companies they might buy from.

Visual branding is extremely important to making a lasting first impression on customers and to winning their loyalty. In this whitepaper, we'll explore some of the data and trends that are defining the digital marketing landscape along with simple, actionable advice for you to improve your brand. Particularly around the holiday season as companies are spending more on advertising to capture the surge in consumer spending, the brands that are set up to win are those that stand out and are top of mind for shoppers.

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Transcript of slides:

1. Nailing Your Visual Brand: How to craft content to create high-value customers.
2. Without any logos, can you name these companies from their Instagram posts?
3. These companies stand out because of the strong visual brand each has crafted around its products.
4. At a glance, your visual brand draws in customers.
5. Eyeballs continue to shift from desktop to mobile, where social media is king.
6. This means that today more than ever before, consumers are visually interacting with companies, like Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat.
7. Companies with high-impact visual brands are trailblazing the road forward for digital marketers. Learn the 3 steps to amplify the return of your email, social media, and other parts of the marketing stack. Build a tribe around your brand’s unique voice. Consistently execute in your marketing. Focus on your content ideas and quality.
8. 1. Build your tribe.
9. Great brands become leaders of tribes. Seth Godin’s depiction of tribe-building translates well to the world of brand-building. “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” Seth Godin - “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us"
10. An effective visual brand finds a core idea and leads the connection with its consumers. Find your core idea by researching and understanding what your customers really care about. Lean into that. Use your marketing to connect with your customer community and build trust with visuals and messaging.
11. There are 3 essential elements to building your tribe: Be Personal. Stay Relevant. Create Anticipation.

12. Be Personal: People like connecting with other people. It’s human nature. Use photos that aren’t airbrushed perfect & don’t be afraid of casual grammar. Stay Relevant: Narrow in on your core audience and make them feel special. Help them get the things they want, and you’ll succeed together. Create Anticipation: Condition your customers to expect high-quality, valuable content from you and they’ll be begging you for more vs. hitting unsubscribe.
13. 2. Execute consistently.
14. The first priority of brand consistency is making a great first impression & immediately showing the tribe’s core value. A great way to demonstrate brand consistency is by curating how your Instagram feed flows together to paint the feeling of your core brand idea. @aleksandrazee Product: Woodworking Feed focus: Golden, cozy color tones and filters on product photos and lifestyle shots in between @thedrybar Product: Hair salon Feed focus: Core yellow brand color used creatively in different types of posts for the brand’s fun vibe
15. The next priority of brand consistency is building trust with customers. Giving customers a dependable experience across all your channels of communication works along the same lines as always putting out a dependable product.  Branding Mistake: Usually, IHOP is known for doing an excellent job with quirky, creative social media content that grabs the attention of their millennial audience. But, a simple inconsistent tweet that crossed the line in its attempt at humor backfired and went viral putting the brand under fire.
16. Determine your team’s bandwidth for content production and stick to it. Social media never sleeps. To stay top of mind, it’s important to focus on a rhythm - daily if possible, but it’s better to post weekly than a couple days here, a couple days there. It’s better to post less often that to be posting sub-par content for the sake of getting a post out every day. Mistakes are made when scrambling to fill slots in a content calendar.
17. 3. Focus on your content.

18. At the core of your brand strategy is the content you’re creating and publishing. The three main components of any piece of content (blog article, social media post, advertisement, etc.) are: Value to customer, Messaging/copy, and Visual media. More and more, the platforms people are using online are visually driven, making the media you choose particularly important.
19. Visual media’s impact continues to rise as attention spans diminish and people are inundated with content. Marketers need to tap into user trends with photos and other visual content to help their brand feel like a natural part of people’s online experience. More than 80 million photos are uploaded each day to Instagram. Users watch six billion videos on Snapchat every day. More than 100 million gifs were shared on Twitter in 2015. Source: Brandcast & Twitter
20. Customers are sensitive to the style of images used by brands, leading towards companies usage of more user-generated content (UGC). Avoid staged, lifeless photos. Choose authentic photos that feel fresh and engaging.
21. UGC is impactful for your visual brand because photos that don’t look like corporate ads help build trust with your customers. Research continues to show the importance of authentic branding: • Ninety-one percent of customers want brands they follow to be authentic in their social media posts. • For millennials, brand authenticity is second only to loyalty discounts in importance when choosing companies to support. Example: The ad to the right from YouTube is a great example of visual branding, pairing an authentic photo with a concise message that speaks to a direct audience. Largely relying on the visual, given that there’s no call-to- action, the ad effectively drives home the core value of DIY-spirit and how YouTube can be valuable to its users. Source: Bonfire Marketing, BCG
22. There are 2 main ways to source authentic photos: 1. Contact user directly and ensure legal use of UGC. - Waiting for person to respond - Legal ambiguity - Risk of issues with model releases or commercial limitations 2. License photos from a royalty-free source. - On-demand access to a large catalog - Legal indemnification - Photos vetted for commercial usability
23. WARNING: It’s essential to make sure that you’re getting legal permission from users when re-posting to avoid massive legal fees. ( fair use copyright laws do not protect you) Example: In 2013, Agence France-Presse was sued for images they stole from photographer Daniel Morel on Twitter, violating copyright. $1.2 million lawsuit
24. Create beautiful, high-performing content with royalty-free authentic photos captured in real life, not a staged studio. • 45 million+ royalty-free photos • Real moments captured by real people • Legally reviewed and vetted Start Free Trial to Twenty20.
25. Overall, you’ll set your company down the right path towards creating an impactful and memorable visual brand by authentically connecting with your customers and delivering high-quality content. Nailing Your Visual Brand: Build a tribe around your brand’s unique voice. Consistently execute in your marketing. Focus on your content ideas and quality. presented by Twenty20.