If you want to create a unified online presence that you and your audience will enjoy, your Instagram branding should be one of your primary concerns. Strengthening your Instagram branding can help you develop a more appealing and recognizable Instagram feed.
Your Instagram brand builds trust with your audience, creates brand recognition, and generates traffic for your account. It’s that important.
So, if you develop a professionally designed and curated Instagram feed that is consistent with your brand voice and design guidelines, your audience will have more confidence in you. The more confidence your audience and new visitors have in your brand and business, the more likely they will follow you and stick around when you reach more people on Instagram.
Moreover, your audience will be able to recognize your content across numerous platforms if your Instagram branding matches your business’ overall identity. By using consistency in your branding, you can use to ensure that your audience can tell whether a post is from your business right away.
Your audience can even tell when you put consideration into the information you provide and how it looks and feels in comparison to your website and other social media pages.
That’s what branding your Instagram does to your account. But, how do you brand your Instagram? And, before we get started, what is branding?
Table of Contents
What is Branding?
Branding consists of the elements that represent you, your business, and your brand. The visual elements, and your brand tone and personality of your business. With Instagram being a photography and video sharing platform, your Instagram branding is most importantly about the appearance of your profile, posts and video content.
Essentially, your Instagram brand image may tell your audience and other users everything they need to know about your business just by looking at it. It’s a communication style of “what you see is what you get”.
So, when it comes to wanting to grab your audience’s attention on Instagram, visual branding is what you should focus. Keep in mind that your branding should express your values and identity, and promote your account in a desirable way to potential customers.
Benefits of Branding Your Instagram
- Increase brand awareness and recognition
- Build trust and credibility with brand consistency
- Boost engagements, leads, and reach
- Represent brand story, values, and personality
Instagram Branding Options
When it comes to your Instagram branding, there are a few things to keep in mind.
- As a business, your logo should be consistent across all platforms to have easier brand recognition. As an influencer, your followers should be able to instantly recognize you from a small circle image.
- Your username should be as close to your brand name as possible.
- You can implement brand colors in your Instagram Story Highlights and posts.
- Your tone of voice even in written captions should be recognizable and consistent throughout.
For example, this Instagram business profile is branded from the profile photo to the Story highlights. It’s all consistent with its creative brand kit.
Consistent Brand Visuals
Ensure all of your content has the same appearance and feel by having a brand palette.
For example, we use our branded colors in the across our post designs. These colors and fonts reflect the branding on our website.
If you’re an influencer or photographer, and not a business. You can apply this to a photo editing style or filter that you like and apply it to all of your edits. You can use photos to create a pattern, or create a grid with items that overlap in your photos.
This is how you can make your brand visuals consistent.
Pinpointing Brand Tone and Voice
Now that you’ve branded your profile and content visuals, there are still Instagram captions to help you give your brand a tone and voice.
What is the personality of your brand? How do you come across to your audience in your captions? What’s more, how do you reply to your audience’s comments and messages?
While a brand voice as a business is often expected to be formal, you can consider how much humor, personality, slang, and other characteristics you want to include. Maybe you own a dog business, or you manage a dog influencer account, you might want to be informal and use slang words like “heck” and “doggo” common within the subculture online. Or, perhaps a more professional tone is appropriate for your business. It’s all up to you!
In any case, make sure to get clarity on your brand voice, especially if you have a big team so whoever is in charge of your brand’s online presence understands how to communicate with your audience.
Posting Frequency
It’s a good idea to post content daily for your brand, and it doesn’t have to be a post! While you don’t want to bombard your audience on their feeds with new posts, you do want to be present, so they continue to connect with your brand.
Here’s a recommended content schedule for Instagram;
- 3 posts per week
- 1 Reel per week
- 1-2 Stories daily
That’s how you can show up and build your brand recognition for your audience to easily recognize you and strengthen the connection with them on Instagram.
Instagram branding has a significant impact on how people perceive and recognize your brand. So, if you want to boost the effectiveness of your digital and social media marketing campaigns, you’ll need to take this into account.
