Strengthening your Instagram brand can help guide your content creation strategy and help you build a more beautiful Instagram feed. Let’s learn more about why branding is so important when it comes to social media platforms like Instagram and how you can ensure your profile has a solid look and feel.
Benefits of Instagram branding
Not totally sold on Instagram branding yet? No worries. Let’s walk you through a few of the major benefits to Instagram branding and why you want to create a stunning and cohesive online presence.
Build trust
When you create a professionally designed and curated Instagram feed that falls in line with your brand voice and design guidelines, you gain more trust from your followers. When you put careful thought into the content you share and the way its look and feel matches your website and other social media profiles, your audience can tell. They appreciate this consistency and the fact that they can identify your brand through your content.
Create brand recognition
When your Instagram branding is on point with your company’s overall brand, your audience is able to recognize your content across multiple platforms. Using a consistent color and font scheme in your branded graphics is one great way to help your audience to immediately be able to tell if a post is coming from your business. Let’s use Panera Bread as an example. Their green and brown color combination and sans serif brand font is instantly recognizable in graphics like the one below.
Generate traffic
While Instagram is infamous for only allowing users to send traffic to a single link in their bio, that doesn’t mean you can’t still take advantage of that. You should regularly switch up where that link leads your audience, whether it’s a new blog post or a landing page you want to promote. You can even create branded links using software like Bitly or Rebrandly.
How to brand your Instagram
Now that you know why this can be such a powerful tool to use for your Instagram presence, let’s dive into some tips on strategy. How can you strengthen your Instagram brand? It’s all about the look and feel of your feed, your brand voice, content types and similar concepts that make a brand.
Basics of Instagram profile branding
There are a number of things that you should be considering when it comes to social media branding – first being that your logo and cover photo (if applicable) should be the same across the board to help with instant brand recognition. When it comes to your Instagram profile, it may feel like you don’t have a lot of profile elements to customize except for the content you upload to your feed and your stories. However, there are a few things you still need to brand, like your profile photo, username, bio and your Instagram story highlights. Take a look at how beautifully Paddywax Candles sync with their overall brand visual identity their story highlights in the example below. The pastel colors create a cohesive look and feel that matches their logo. You can do something similar with your brand colors, or you can use icons, graphic illustrations and more.
Create content with a similar look
The best way to start out your Instagram branding strategy is by looking at the content you’re creating. Come up with the best strategy for ensuring your content has a similar look and feel across the board. There are a few different ways you can do this, but let’s take an example at a snippet of StoriesEdit‘s Instagram feed first. Their feed uses a color blocking technique, where they focus on a single color for nine photos before moving onto the next. Above, you can see a section of their pink brand color block. Other ideas include:
Use a rainbow or ombré look throughout your Instagram feed. Stick with a single focus color for all of your content. Find a photo edit effect or filter you like and use it for all images. Create a pattern with graphics and photos throughout your feed. Put together a grid where your photos have elements that overlap.
Find the content type that makes the most sense for your brand and start creating content around it to see if it succeeds with your audience.
Pinpoint your brand tone and voice
What is your brand’s personality? How do you come off in your captions? Better yet, how do you respond to your audience when they leave comments or send messages? One great example of a set brand voice that we have to talk about comes from Frank Body. Take a look at their 7th birthday Instagram post below. Frank Body is well known for their first person brand voice. The product is speaking for itself, and has made quite a name for this unconventional strategy in the marketing and branding community. While your brand voice might not be quite this bold, you do need to determine what level of humor, personality, slang and other qualities you might allow in. Or, perhaps for your brand, a more professional tone like “friendly, helpful and educational” connects best with your audience. Either way, be sure to put together your brand voice on paper so that anyone managing your brand’s online presence knows how to handle it.
Post often and consistently
While you don’t want to go overboard and overwhelm your followers’ Instagram feed with new posts all day long, you do want to maintain consistency so that you regularly show up in your followers’ feeds and they continue to engage with your content. It’s a good idea to post about once a day to your brand Instagram account, and you can easily use a tool like Sprout Social to help you find the optimal times to share your content. You can also supplement your feed content with Instagram Stories that match the brand look and feel you’ve established to help keep your brand top of mind and further drive interest in your feed.
Create Instagram branding guidelines for your team
The most essential recommendation to ensure that your Instagram stays on brand is to put together a social media style guide for your company and your marketing teams. This is where you can lay out your color schemes, font pairs and guidelines, brand voice, graphic suggestions and so much more. Brand guidelines are essential when working with a team and still keeping your online presence branded and cohesive.
Start strengthening your Instagram branding today
Ramp up your Instagram brand today by putting all of these tips and tactics to use. Then, get started building an even larger community, generating traffic and creating revenue through Instagram advertising.
