Develop visual consistency on Instagram to strengthen brand identity and build audience trust. This article outlines effective strategies by analyzing major brands, such as Dove, and offers practical tips for smaller brands to achieve a cohesive look and message.
Key Insights
- Maintain a consistent color palette, graphic style, and video editing approach to create a unified visual identity that strengthens brand credibility and fosters audience trust.
- Use design tools like Canva and implement a brand guidebook outlining color usage, typography, and layout standards to streamline content creation and enforce consistency.
- Dove’s Instagram strategy demonstrates how combining varied content themes, such as empowerment campaigns, product partnerships, and testimonials, can still align under a cohesive visual and messaging framework centered around inclusivity and self-esteem.
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Hello, and let's continue on in section four of the Instagram Bootcamp and discuss the importance of developing visual consistency. As you know, content from a brand is presented on their brand page in the form of a grid, and at one glance, you can see all the content, the posts, the videos that that brand has posted, and at a glance, your audience can see if there's visual consistency across that content. Is it a similar color palette? Are they using similar graphic elements, graphic styles like the font on the captions? Are the videos having similar types of music, right? The editing style of the video is it all quick cuts, sort of fast-paced videos, or is it more drawn out? What is the vibe of the video, right? And there should be consistency across all of that.
Your brand and content should begin to stand for a particular style. Your color palette must be consistent, right? We're looking at content from a larger brand, but best practices for a smaller brand are to emulate the big guys within your category because a lot of what they do, you can do. You can use templates to create consistency, like Canva templates or other design platforms, to create consistency in how people design everything from your videos to your single image posts, right? You can create a brand guidebook which shows the color palettes, the primary colors that are used that can be used and the backup colors that can be used.
Many designers will be happy to provide that for you, right? You know, once you have that in place, that can be used moving forward, right? Doing so again creates credibility, which leads to trust, right? Because if you look like a professional, a top brand, then your audience will begin to see you as a top brand, and that's one of the main ingredients to that visual consistency. And looking at Dove's page, right? Right off the top, we see how they're using story highlights to present different products in their product line, different campaigns they're involved with, hashtag keep beauty, which is an excellent use of that type of content, right? It sort of draws people immediately to important aspects of your brand. They can see at a glance the product services that you may provide and the campaigns you're involved in and we can certainly see a great degree of visual consistency with their brand, you know, very obviously is a major brand so you would expect that level of type of polished content but you could certainly adhere to the same principles they do and a lot of this let's talk about brand themes or types of content, right? As we did in the previous video, and you looked at a brand, let's do the same thing here.
A lot of the content we see is around brand building, right? Introducing various products, right? But that's not necessarily the only content they have, themes that they have. Here is, call me confident, right? Call me confident, it's time to shift praise from looks alone to celebrating girls' unique personalities, abilities, and achievements. Certainly keeping with their big idea of not just focusing on singular dimensions like looks or making impressions over that, but looking at things more holistically, right? So this is the current way that they're showing these girls are so much more than just beautiful, let's tell them.
So it's motivating content, right? Empowering content. Content that could definitely hook and connect emotionally with their product audiences. Now let's look at this one.
Again, a lot of brand-building content. I'm trying to see if I can pull out some that will be, well, here is an example of partner content. The Rockettes, you know, the world-famous dance troupe, the Rockettes from the music hall, have a partnership with them.
And so it's a partner-type theme content, but also a testimonial because she's explaining or showing the various products that she uses, right? So that is a different theme of content, right? So you can look through this and likely find different types and themes of content, but still consistent with the overall brand themes. As Ward with an afro. How does your hair make you feel? Confident.
It makes me feel brave, and it makes me feel like I have an invisible crown on top of my head. So another example that again leads into the themes of inclusivity. We partnered with a partnership post, right? Recess Therapy asks kids to share what makes their hair so special.
Watch the full My Hair is Amazing episode, right? Again, the hashtag Dove self-esteem project, right? So they continue to lean into that as their big idea as they promote products and services for various customer needs, meeting various customer challenges. So they're doing a number of things with their content, right? Using different themes, but it is still consistent with the overall theme of inclusivity, redefining beauty, addressing concerns that various customer segments may have, whether it's product concerns, self-esteem concerns, right? So you can see the consistency across messaging as well as across their visuals across their content.