Getting the right look and feel for your social media content can be overwhelming, but your brand will reap the rewards if done right. We explain why social media aesthetics and consistent themes are so important.
Whether you’re starting on your business journey or have landed your dream marketing job, you’ll need to be across the importance of communicating with your customers on social media.
Using social media for business communication has changed the way companies interact with customers. Well-planned social media strategies can increase brand awareness, drive people to your website and encourage customer engagement.
That’s not to say you post just for the sake of posting. Low-quality content or content that doesn’t relate to your brand can be as damaging as inconsistent posting or not posting at all.
And with the increasing shift to image-based social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, it’s now more important than ever that your brand style is on point.
What is a social media brand aesthetic, and how do you create it for your business?
So, what is a brand aesthetic? In simple terms, it refers to the look and feel of your brand. Your brand’s social media aesthetic should complement your brand values, identity, and tone of voice.
How do you create a social media aesthetic?
- Determine your brand colours. The colour palette you choose is critical in conveying your brand values. Some colours send an immediate message to your customers.
- Think about your brand’s tone of voice. Is it bright and cheery, elegant and sophisticated, dark and broody, or casual and fun? Your aesthetic should align with your brand image.
- Look at what others are doing. Have a look at some of your favourite businesses and brands. What are they doing? Can you instantly identify the brand when you look at the socials?
- Once you find some inspiration, create your own style tool kit. Create a mood board to help decide your preferred colours, fonts, images, and filters. Check out this great post from Davey & Krista on how to explore and create your mood board.
If you don’t have access to a design team, Canva offers a great selection of mood board templates through its free subscription, but you may want to buy the Pro plan to access all the bells and whistles.
Pinterest is another excellent source of inspiration when researching your mood board. You could spend hours down that rabbit hole!
Why brand aesthetics are important for brand awareness
How important is a consistent social media brand aesthetic? Pretty important, as it turns out. Brand aesthetics aren’t just nice to have to make your brand look pretty on social media.
A clear, defined brand aesthetic also builds trust between you and your customers. Your brand is easily recognisable, and your posts don’t send mixed messages.
Think of some of the major players in the business world. What do you think of when you picture their brand?
Consistent content themes can generate instant recognition of your brand
You know the saying, content is key? Well, consistently themed content is crucial.
Consistent themes and aesthetics build brand awareness, credibility, and trustworthiness, and help drive social media engagement. When people recognise, like and relate to what they see, they are more likely to engage with your content.
Having a consistent theme across all social media platforms strengthens your brand image.
How consistent content themes can save you time
Having consistent visual themes not only helps with brand awareness, the strategic use of pre-determined content themes can also make life easier for you. Creating quality content is time-consuming and requires a specific skill.
As a time-poor business owner or in a fast-paced marketing team, having a well-planned content calendar that structures content into themes or theme days (or weeks) can make life a little less frantic.
Clearly structured, consistent themes help improve efficiencies by:
- giving you time to plan well ahead and carefully consider your content, rather than posting ad-hoc
- reducing confusion and taking the guesswork out of creating social media content
- freeing you and your team to move on to other tasks.
What if your socials aren’t delivering a consistent brand message?
Concerned your social content is letting your brand down? Don’t stress. It’s never too late to consider a brand refresh or complete rebrand. Read our article to see if a refresh or rebrand is the right option for you.
Social media marketing is sometimes overwhelming and, as a result, can be a task that gets pushed to the bottom of your ever-growing to-do list.
But if you spend time defining your brand aesthetics and themes, you will reap the rewards and make social media content creation much more enjoyable.
And with the extra time you save and the peace of mind that you are conveying a consistent brand message to your audience, you can have a bit of fun playing with those colours and filters you so carefully selected.
Now, go have fun!