Does Your Visual Marketing Reflect Your Brand?

If you spend much time at all reading articles about content marketing, then you probably know how important visual marketing is. In an increasingly photo-dominated digital landscape, one in which Instagram and Pinterest gain in prestige every day and Facebook and Twitter keep pushing pics to the fore, it’s important that your brand engages users not just with meaningful text, but also with well-chosen imagery.

But what exactly does that mean for your marketing efforts? If you think it means you can just slap together some funny memes or vaguely on-topic infographics—a few cat pictures and movie tie-ins, maybe—think again. It’s not enough to have funny or interesting pictures; the images you use in your content marketing—whether you curate them or create them from scratch—ultimately need to underscore your brand’s identity, its values, its message.

So how can you ensure that your visual marketing remains not just compelling, but on-brand? A few tips from the Grammar Chic team:

1. Work with a set, limited color palette. Some of our Grammar Chic clients prefer to use only black and white photos. Others work only with a set of two to four colors that tie in with their logo and website colors. You can set the limitations however you want, but do work with a specific visual vocabulary—some basic colors that will be immediately associated with your brand.


2. Speak to problems and solutions. Your branding should always focus on delivering the solution to your customers’ problems, as determined by your buyer personas. Visual branding is no different. Even when you’re being a little cheeky, humorous, or coy, focus on a value proposition. Our Chic Resumes brand uses a lot of funny graphics, but all of them come back around to this basic point: You need a job, and we can provide you with a resume that boosts your chances of getting it!


3. Don’t forget hashtags and calls to action. You have to be careful here—Facebook won’t let you use much text on your cover photo, for instance—but when possible, tie the images you use back to your main branding simply by including a website address or a relevant hashtag.

Pictures speak volumes, and as such, you want to make sure they’re saying the right thing—and that what they’re saying is consistent with your overall brand messaging.

Does Your Visual Marketing Reflect Your Brand?