New Year, New Aesthetic

First impressions are the most important and memorables ones. Your brand logo, icons, color palette, fonts, and overall aesthetic are all tools that when used consistently, cohesively and correctly, will ensure that your customers first interaction with your brand is exactly what you want it to be.  

In many cases, a consumer's first interaction with a brand is through your website and social media. To make sure your potential consumers have a positive experience when visiting or discovering your brand through social channels, like Instagram, it is crucial that your content is consistent with your brand and pleasing to the eye. 

Instagram is a platform used to not only attract consumers but also to build relationships and provide useful information or entertaining content to your audience. Although it is important to stay on brand, it is equally as important to have fun with it!

Colors, Fonts, & Logos - Quick Tips 

1. Decide on a primary brand color, and a few secondary brand colors.
2. Choose a primary brand font that will be used for the body of all text on branded material, and a primary webfont. 
3. In order to make your logo stand out, do not distort the proportions or add any shadows. 

Finding Insta Inspo 

Pinterest and VSCO are both great places to find inspiration for your brand’s Instagram. Make sure to be specific when searching for your inspo, adding the world “aesthetic” or “fine art“ at the end of your search will help to narrow your search results down and provide higher quality images. 

Creating a shared board on Pinterest and giving access to your fellow co-workers/employees can help to visualize ideas in a consistent manner. Pinterest and VSCO are also both great places to find “repostable” content, just make sure to give credit to the original content owner in the caption! 

Editing Your Insta Photos 

VSCO and Tezza are both great apps to edit photo and video content. Using presets that come with the app, or creating your own preset for your photos can help to give each piece of content the same overall look and feel, even if the original lighting, brightness etc. is off. 

To ensure that your photos still look natural even after adding effects/filters, use a combination of effects, and adjust the intensity of each effect (most of the time a filter should never be all the way up or down). 

Creating Content 

Canva is a free graphic design platform used to create a wide variety of content such as social media posts, posters, presentations, invitations, flyers, and much more. If you are just getting started, it is important to establish a color pallet of about 3-6 colors that you are going to focus on for all of your content creation pieces. 

Once you have established a color pallet to use in Canva, you can create social media content for all platforms. Canva has many templates to choose from, and you can also create content completely from scratch. 

Canva is also a great platform to create your logo, Email signature, business card, invoices, gift certificates, labels, and other basic business documents. Make sure to use the “folder” tool to keep all of your content pieces and documents well organized and accessible. 

Planning it all Out

Now it is time to start using a planning app like Snug and/or Planoly! Every Instagram post should be well planned out in advance, and Snug and Planoly are both tools to help you do so. Using these apps will help you to layout your feed, see how it looks without actually posting it, generate captions and hashtags, and schedule your posts. 

It is important to plan your posts ahead of time in order to avoid communication mistakes such as an out of place photo, spelling error in a caption, or forgetting to post all together. Uploading your posts to Snug or Planoly will allow you to catch these mistakes and elevate your posts to the next level! 

Listen to Your Audience

Keep in mind, your social media aesthetic and content should represent your brand and it’s values! Not every piece of content posted needs to be of your products or services. Although social media is a great place to start advertising, it is an even better place to connect with your consumers! Listen to your audience, find out why they follow you, what content they want to see from you, and run with it!