Eye-catching visual content is incredibly important when building and developing your brand identity. When you invest time in creating engaging visuals that impress and inspire on socials, these help forge an original brand identity and make it more likely that viewers remember your brand. Interesting, visually-pleasing creatives give people a reason to follow and engage with your brand – leading to conversions from customers impressed by your social output.

While it’s important to let your creativity run wild with visuals, we’ve put together five tips to follow to make sure you stand out on socials.

 

1 – Keep it simple to be effective :

It’s important to have a clear focal point, without any overcrowding of imagery and text, so that your creatives are easy to process and quickly obtain information from. If you consider an Instagram user, for example, encountering your ad on their scroll, you have a matter of seconds to get their attention. Creatives that are too ‘busy’ might cause information overload, resulting in this user scrolling past.

Instead, by keeping it simple in layout and content, with minimal text and imagery, you’re more likely to garner interest in your brand/product. With simple yet eye-catching visuals, you can attract attention with ease, and gain brand awareness. With consistency and uniformity, visuals can make you instantly recognisable.

 

^ This Instagram post by Spotify keeps things nice and simple, with minimal text and graphics to communicate its message. Spotify’s visuals are stylistically consistent, meaning their creatives are instantly recognisable as Spotify-owned. This gives them a strong brand identity.

 

2 – Use high quality images :

Always aim for the highest image quality (pixels, resolution and aspect ratio) to avoid any stretching, cropping or blurriness. Poor image quality and appearance will not be a good reflection of your brand and your product quality. To build trust, ensure the imagery you use in visuals is always the highest quality.

 

3 – Less is more with word count :

The text you include in visual creatives should be as concise as possible, and easy to read and comprehend. Whether it’s quote images, text overlays or stylised typography, ‘less is more’ is the way to go. With text, make sure you :

  • Have a clear colour contrast between the text and background so it’s easy to read
  • Keep line length and phrasing short
  • Choose a legible font that fits the tone you wish to convey
  • Pair serif and sans serif fonts when you use more than one font
  • Remove any text that doesn’t add value to your visual , aiming for less than 20% text in a visual
  • Check spelling and grammar for any errors/typos.

 

^ This simple graphic by Organic Basics uses minimal text organised in a format that is easy to read and obtain information from, with text and imagery clearly differentiated in colour.

 

4 – Add animation to stand out :

Adding GIFs and videos add engaging movement and narrative to static visuals, which allow your creatives to stand out even further. Storylines maintain interest for longer and lead to increased engagement in a post. Consider including moving images to your social output to boost your brand engagement.

 

^ This Instagram post by Chamberlain Coffee was converted into a short video with animated graphics, creating effective and engaging content to promote their subscription service.

 

5 – Include your brand logo :

Finally, where appropriate, it’s a good idea to include your logo, so that social media users associate your high quality creatives with your brand straightaway. Add subtle, yet noticeable, branding to visuals, and change to a neutral/greyscale form if your logo’s original form would make the visual too ‘busy’.

^ This Instagram post by Innocent is clearly yet subtly branded.

 

To sum up, ensure you invest time in your creatives, keeping them simple, yet eye-catching and visually-pleasing, for effective messaging and strengthened brand identity. Still need some assistance with crafting effective visual creatives? Book a call with us today and discover how our expert team can help you escalate your brand identity and social media presence.