Some studies show that you have to put your brand in front of consumers around 77 times to land your message and get a sale. So it's more important than ever to work on building a consistent brand style and gaining better recognition in order to make a connection with your target audience.
This week while freelancing for a design agency who services global corporate companies I had to create some social post visuals as part of a wider campaign.
The standard practice to begin with is to load the brand colour palette and fonts, make sure the logo is sized and positioned correctly and consistently, then to follow the campaign style for imagery and positioning.
With this particular campaign was also a set of rules on how to position headline text inside a graphical lozenge shape. I was provided with a guideline sheet demonstrating how to do this. By tucking the shape behind part of the person in the image, it layered the visual and physically linked the message directly to the target audience.
Whilst positioning it, I also needed to retain the correct margins around the text based on how many lines of text there were, and ensure balance with all the other elements in the visual.
It was quite fiddly and at one point I admit that it did seem a bit of an impossible ask to follow all these rules with an arbitrary set of variable elements but after playing around, I finally cracked it. Once I had all the elements in place and sat back to view the full set of ads, it all became worthwhile. The brand style was consistent, recognisable and professional looking.
While these corporate global brands have entire departments to develop a brand style and create multiple documents to aid designers in following the brand when creating new campaigns, as a small business you would probably rather not spend thousands! But you don’t need to go too deep to make a solid start. Just by being aware of this and asking your creative professionals to reach out to each other and follow the same style is a fantastic place to start.
I provide my clients with a brand guidelines sheet after every branding project, which details colour breakdowns, alternative versions of the logo to use on light and dark backgrounds, in portrait and landscape formats if needed. I can also include suggested fonts and any other guidance I can offer for you to follow in-house or brief other creative professionals to ensure consistency of your brand.
With marketing campaign briefs, I would ask lots of questions about other assets that you might already have, to determine if I need to follow a style that’s already been set. If you don’t have a style to follow, or would like to start afresh, I would offer to do that as part of the package and follow up with some guidance on how to use it in-house or advise other creatives who work on your brand.
Unless your customers mostly come through word of mouth, it's a staggeringly high amount of times that your brand needs to get seen before it's recognised, trusted and then purchased. Having a consistent brand style plays a huge part in this and something I'm extremely passionate about.
Get in touch if you'd like to know more about how I can help your brand.
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