Social Media Marketing
5 Design Tips To Give Your Brand A Boost
Humans are incredibly visual beings. In fact, 90% of the information absorbed by our brains is visual, with the other 10% comes from the rest of our senses. While it takes us anywhere from 3.75 to 7.5 seconds to process a written sentence, it only takes us 13 to 150 milliseconds to process an image. This knowledge is extremely important when designing, especially in spaces like social media. The average user is likely scrolling through their feed quickly, so impactful images are essential. As a follow-up to our last blog post about social media’s benefits for small businesses, we wanted to dive into how to make good graphics that will promote your brand.
Types Of Posts To Make
Creating a variety of content is also extremely important to engage your potential audience. Don’t just make the same one or two sales style posts trying to get customer’s attention. It will have the opposite effect over time, leading your customers to ignore the posts you make. Your social media posts should only contain 20% sales posts, and the rest should be informative, fun, and engaging. Our recommendation is a mix of the following:
- Industry Tips
- Infographics
- Weekly motivational quotes
- Competitions
- Informative sales posts
- Fun Fact/” On This Day” informative posts
- Polls
Content Formats
There are also several forms of content that are helpful to use depending on what you are trying to achieve. These can range from static illustrations to videos or animations.
Graphics
This can include your original graphic designs, illustrations, or infographics. If you are trying to convey a single idea or two quickly, this design type is the best way to go.
Photos
Photographs be a convenient way to show what your company is doing on the job or behind the scenes. Generally, you will want to add a caption along with them to help your customers fully engage with the content. Pictures of people, especially where you can see their faces, tend to receive the best engagement, performing up to 40% better on sites like Instagram.
Videos
If you can create polished videos with a clear message, you will find they will give you a massive boost. A well-put-together video can generate up to 1200% more shares than images or text. Don’t forget to make your video informative, as it is likely to get more engagement that one that is purely sales focused. People also tend to react well to videos that are fun and original. Great examples of this are Old Spice or Squatty Potty. They both blend off-the-wall ideas with creative explanations of what they are selling in a way that makes you want them. Try to keep your videos to under 2 minutes, however, as if they end up too long, the viewer is more likely to either skip through or close the video.
GIFS
No matter how you pronounce it, GIFS are a staple of the internet. Bridging the gap between video and image, they’ve been around forever and aren’t going anywhere soon. They’re a great way to show a preview of a video or show off a product and how it functions. Just like with videos, make sure your GIF is high quality both in content and image quality to ensure a good return.
Color Is Important
We’ve mentioned this before in our post about logo design. Color is an essential part of any design as it has the ability to cause an emotional response. The main task of color past causing an emotional reaction is to make a graphic eye-catching. The users you are trying to capture are generally scrolling through their news feeds. This means you have only a few seconds to make a user read your message. Make sure to use colors that pop while reinforcing and complementing your brand colors for the best results. If you haven’t set specific brand colors yet, take this time to do so. Once picked, make sure you stick with them and try not to deviate. Pick 2-3 primary brand colors (those that appear in your logo) and a maximum of 5 secondary colors. These secondary colors will be used less than your primary colors. They are intended to help you stay on brand while retaining some variety and flexibility in your designs.
Use Consistent Typography
Your business may already have a specific font or a couple of fonts for your marketing. If not, try to find 1-3 fonts that complement your branding and try to stick to using just those fonts in your social media graphics. In general, you will have one main font that makes up your text’s body and 1-2 more decorative fonts, one of which might match your logo.
Make Posts Across Multiple Social Networks
It’s essential that you create content where your customers are. For many companies, that means a combination of one or more sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. We will focus on the first two, as they will almost always be the most important for your business.
In general, Facebook will contain the bulk of your audience. You will want to focus a large portion of your attention there. According to Pew Research Center, roughly 69% of adults in the United States use Facebook. While it has a much more balanced age demographic than other social media platforms, it does skew towards a more mature audience than the other platforms. The average Facebook users’ age is 40.5 years old so keep this in mind when creating design content.
When setting up your profile, make sure to choose profile pictures and cover photos that complement each other. You will almost always want to make your logo your profile picture to help reinforce your brand. We recommend updating your cover photo regularly with whatever new offer, promotion, or event you are currently running to keep things fresh.
YouTube
YouTube is another platform that you will want to invest time into and is the best place to host the videos that you will hopefully be creating. This is because YouTube has 2+ billion users, making up nearly one-third of the entire internet.
Like Facebook, you will want to use your logo for your profile image here. However, it’s not as important to update your banner image. One of the most critical parts of your content here, other than the videos themselves, will be the thumbnails you set up for each video. Don’t just use a still from the video. Make sure to create one for each video to help your business stand out from the crowd. Statistics have shown that the most effective thumbnails tend to include faces. Include a person in the thumbnail whenever it makes sense to do so (Obviously barring videos that don’t have people in them). Put those people on a simple background and make sure that they stand out from it. We also recommend including either your brand colors or your logo itself in the thumbnail for brand recognition purposes.
If you have social media design questions or are looking for social media marketing services, give our friendly marketing team a call at 618.681.4030, or book online using the handy button above.
Remember, do what you do best, let us do the rest.
About the Author: Jason Shadowen
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