Are you struggling to create consistent visual branding for your small business? This is something small business owners often get stuck with, especially when they are creating their own social media posts. In this post I will walk you through five key elements of your visual brand identity and give you some actionable tips to keep on track.

How to you know if you are creating consistent visual content?

To check if you are creating consistent visual branding content for your socials, firstly go to your Instagram bio (or other social media homepage). Begin by taking a look at your logo, then scroll down to see the last 9 posts you created. Now with those posts in mind, check the key items below and make adjustments where necessary.

Logo

Your logo is obviously an important part of your visual identity. Often the best logos are very simple in design, but very memorable. Nike is a great example of this – the tick says it all! Is your logo consistent with your brand colours and fonts? And is it easy to read, even when it is small? You may decide to use an image instead of your logo on Instagram, but it is still worth checking if your logo is consistent with the rest of your visual branding and make changes accordingly.

Colour

Now here is something you can try to test the consistency of your Instagram feed. Take a look at your first nine images. Can you easily pick out at least three of your main brand colours? If not, then you probably need to include your brand colours more in your images and graphics (I will talk more about how to do that below). Overall keep to around four main brand colours and a maximum of six. And be sure to stick to your brand colours across all of your visual content and on different platforms too.

Images 

Do your images have a similar look and feel to them? One way to achieve this is to use filter settings on your photos. One of my favourite apps to do this is Pic Tap Go. It has lots of great ways to improve the look of your images and you can save your favourite settings and easily apply them to all your photos. If you haven’t tried it give it a go and let me know if you like it, or alternatively use your favourite photo editor.

Graphics

There are lots of ways you can bring in your brand colours using graphics. You could use a border in a brand colour around an image, or apply coloured overlay graphic elements or text.

Fonts

Are you sticking to the same two or three fonts? If you are using too many different fonts styles your feed can tend to look cluttered. Also, try to keep to similar font sizes when you are creating repeat posts, such as quotes etc. You will need a strong font style for headings, something contrasting for sub-headings (handwritten fonts are currently a popular choice) and a font for your main body text. For this look for something easy to read, such as Helvetica or Arial or something similar.

Tip 1: To help with visual branding skills, watch my video tutorial where I show you how to use lines to create consistent looking quote posts using Canva. You can view it here.

Tip 2: Keep in mind when you are creating your posts which images/graphics will sit next to each other in your feed. It is a good idea to plan this out in advance to see how they look before you post them. There are many scheduling tools you can use to do this, but you can also simply create your posts in Canva and click on the little square that says “grid view” in the bottom right hand corner of the screen see how they look in a grid format.

Take action

If you need to make some changes to be more consistent with your visual content, it can be a fun exercise to take a screenshot of your current nine-grid now before applying any of the above changes, then in a few weeks take another screenshot to compare the difference.

Are you following me on Instagram?

If you try this out, let me know how you go and I would love to see your before and after shots and share them in my socials. Simply drop me a DM on Instagram @makerbizgraphics

Happy designing!

AFFILIATE LINKS DISCLOSURE:

Please note that a some of the links included in this post are affiliate links. This means that if you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you.