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Want your Instagram feed to reflect your brand?
Looking for ways to create an Instagram presence people recognize?
Attracting your target audience on Instagram starts with a well-planned approach to your visuals.
In this article, you'll discover how to define an Instagram style for your business.
#1: Echo Your Brand's Visual Identity
Brand assets like fonts, colors, and logos are important tools for creating brand recognition and recall. Use your assets consistently, and your followers can identify your posts more easily in the feed.
Freshii's Instagram effectively incorporates their logo into their Instagram posts. While they don't add their logo to every photo, they do so often enough to create an association.
Meanwhile, Cadbury's Instagram is all about repeating their iconic purple color. Not only does this reinforce their brand identity, it also creates consistency in their Instagram aesthetic.
#2: Choose a Signature Filter
One of the easiest ways to curate your Instagram feed and create a cohesive aesthetic is to find the right filter and stick with it. Although that doesn't mean you have to stick with a single filter for the rest of your Instagram branding life, it does mean limiting yourself to a few similar filters.
It's a subtle visual hack but very effective, as you can see from the Illyria Pottery Instagram feed.
TV personality Lauren Conrad clearly uses the same filter on every photo. This not only creates cohesion in her feed but also evokes a mood or feel for her posts.
When choosing a filter, think about what feelings you want to evoke when people scroll through your Instagram as a whole. Classic? Vintage? Dark and provoking? Bright and airy? The right filter can help you capture a particular mood for your posts.
Another fun way to think about Instagram filters is through actual scientific study. Refinery29 shares the best filters according to science.
#3: Share How-To Content
Using filters isn't the only way to be creative with your photos on Instagram. There are many other interesting ways to engage with your photography! Photo collages, for example, are a fun way to feature multiple images in a single post. They're visually dynamic and extremely useful for visual content marketing.
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Naturally, brands like Benefit, which have a lot of products to feature, love making use of photo collages on Instagram. Collages are great for creating visual step-by-step guides like the one shown below. Add numbers, text, and even your logo to brand your collage.
With this collage, Staples has a little fun showing their fans a clever way to repurpose floppy disks into a desk accessory.
Video is also an important type of visual marketing content. Did you know that followers who watch videos are 85% more likely to buy the product? And by 2019, it's been predicted that 80% of all Internet traffic will be comprised of videos.
Now that Instagram lets you share 3- to 60-second videos and has rolled out the new Instagram Stories feature, it's important to add videos to your visual content mix.
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BuzzFeed Tasty deliciously monopolizes the Instagram video trend, at least as far as the food industry is concerned. Using fun background music and font overlay to showcase recipes, their videos can garner millions of views quite quickly.
#4: Feature Product Images From Your Fans
Social media is about being connected to your audience, and nothing does a better job of that than user-generated content. These types of Instagram posts are important for two reasons. First, they turn your Instagram feed from a brochure-like album into an organic and authentic storytelling vehicle. Second, they transform your audience into a community.
Fitness entrepreneurs Karena and Katrina of Tone It Up! fame have perfected the ideal mix of images on their Instagram feed. Alongside their product promotions, they intermingle posts that highlight their “Tone It Up Babes” fitness stories. They allow Tone It Up's subscribers to tell real, personal stories about their journey.
By using their own fans as influencers, Tone It Up is letting real users attest to their product's effectiveness and build serious customer loyalty at the same time.
Pottery Barn is another great example of a brand that knows how to engage users with their own content. Through their hashtag campaign #mypotterybarn, they're able to find and repost the best images from their customers. You can also use this tactic to show potential customers how others are using your products.
Nest, maker of programmable security cameras, shares user-submitted videos of what their customers' pets get up to while they're away. If user-generated photos are considered trustworthier than brand-generated ones, imagine how much more influential and engaging user-generated videos can be (especially ones that feature cats!).
Want more like this? Explore Instagram for Business!
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Conclusion
To successfully market to your audience on a visual platform such as Instagram, you need to develop an instantly recognizable presence. From your overall feed to the individual images and videos you post, each one should reinforce brand recall.
Your Instagram feed, follower engagement, and even brand recall and loyalty are only as good as the images you post. That's why it's important to follow an Instagram visual style and stick with it.
Use the tips above to help you create an Instagram feed that not only engages followers, but also reflects your business image.
What do you think? What are your special tricks to create a visually appealing and cohesive Instagram feed? Do you have a favorite way to create posts that your fans will instantly recognize? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
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