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Visuals and Your Branding Strategy
Visuals are a key piece to effective branding strategy. Think about social media, the first thing that is seen is the image. While images have always been important, they are even more so now.
Studies have shown that 80% of the information that goes into the brain is visual. This means your brand needs to create images that are memorable. How are your brand’s images? Are they leaving an impression?
What is Brand Imagery?
Brand imagery is all the visuals that make up your company. Images are the way a brand communicates with its audience visually. The imagery affects your brand messaging and the perception of what your brand stands for. Are the photographs edgy, modern, artistic, or clean?
The saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” is absolutely true when it comes to branding.
Target Audience and Your Images
Before creating visuals, you need to think about your target audience. What do they want to see? Is it important to them? Do the style and tone speak the same language? These questions will help you not only think about your brand’s message, but what will your target audience gravitate to.
Imagery is More Than Just the Picture
Imagery is more than the photo it is about design. Design includes the color, composition, font, content, and style altogether.
Photographs are the most common brand images illustrations can also make for some great visuals. Illustrations can change it up from just stock photos and add some creative styling.
Creating images can sound like a daunting task, especially for non-graphic designers. However, there are many great tools that will help you create a design perfect for your brand. The creation tools vary from full-service creation, meaning you can do it all in the program, templates, animation tools, and more. If you are looking to create beautiful images, check out the 15 Tools for Creating Quick and Beautiful Social Media Images by Hootsuite. The links for apps and programs are a great place to start.
Ways to Use a Narrative
Images represent the brand, who you are, and what you stand for. Think of brands like Nike, the famous swoosh image, and the slogan “Just do It” on the images. It represents the narrative of what they want for their followers, and it powerfully sticks with everyone.
Mission-based companies use images to remind their followers that when you purchase the product, they donate to a charity. Toms is a great example of using imagery to remind their customers that they are in the business of improving lives. While this is only one example, many brands use imagery to speak the narrative they want heard.
Professional Photos Build Brands
Hiring a photographer will get the high-quality photos that also have your brand’s distinctive style and composition that engages with your audience. It is a branding investment that will ensure you get high-quality photographs.
Authentic photos carry a lot of credibility, which is why having original photographs is important, especially if you sell products. You want to showcase an actual representation of what you sell.
Stock Photography
Stock photos have both positive and negatives, however, if you follow some branding rules with them, they can be useful.
Use photos that follow with your branding guidelines, color and style. If there is a stock photo, you find that immediately makes you think of another brand, then look for something else. You do not want a potential customer seeing the visual and thinking of the other brand.
Photos can be highly useful for blog articles, especially when you are turning out blogs every week. The best option when it comes to photos is to use a combination of authentic and stock photos.
Stock Photography Resource
When you want to buy high-quality images, it can be complicated to know the best choices both in price and high-resolution quality. A great stock photo resource is Stock Photo Secrets. They have compiled a list of the 20 photo stock sites and what makes them a good choice and different budget options.
Create a Library
An image library will have both custom photos and stock photos that you have purchased. Having a library of photos will save time when you are printing materials or working on a social media calendar. Within the library have the images in different sizes, this will save design time.
This library should also include vector assets. Vector assets are simple shape-based icons and logos.
Images Help Build a Brand’s Reputation
No matter where the image is from or type, stock, original, illustration, you want to make sure that there is consistency throughout all of them. The same story should be told in a variety of ways. Images tell your brand’s story, so you want to make sure that you take it seriously for every asset. Our team at GoMcIntyre understands the importance of imagery and can help you assess where you are strong and where you need to make changes. Contact us today for a consultation.
