Having a clear online presence is key for growing your audience, and your Instagram branding plays a large role. Find out how to strengthen yours here!

Why Instagram Branding is Vital

Having the correct branding will help you attract the right audience. Whether you’re a small business, independent artist or content creator, Instagram is a great tool for making yourself known. Strong visual branding builds trust and makes you look professional. It also gets your message and personality across quickly and clearly, without a single word needed. The world of social media is a fast-paced place, so you need to be instantly recognisable. Great visual branding equals brand recognition, which is hugely beneficial to your endeavour. Furthermore, if you get your branding right, you’re more likely to gain followers and grow your business/project/venture.

How to Strengthen Your Branding

There are a few actions you can take to strengthen your online image and Instagram branding. Fortunately, they’re pretty much all free and relatively uncomplicated, if you’re prepared to sit and give it some thought. It’s all about the look and feel of your feed, your tone of voice and the type of content that you cover.

Logo & Graphics

This might seem like a small aspect of whatever business or project you’re working on, but it is not to be overlooked. Your logo will appear across your output, so it needs to reflect who you are and what you’re about. To establish this, think about your core values. What do you want your output to say to people, how should it make them feel, what is its place in the world? Sorry if that sounds a little heavy, but putting yourself out there is kind of a big deal. Taking a look at people doing similar things to you is a great way to get inspiration and see what works and what doesn’t. Some simple concepts can be applied here, so don’t overthink it. If you’re a videographer specialising in extreme sports, maybe don’t include gentle colours or fluffy kittens in your logo.

Once you’ve decided on your logo, you need to ensure that all your graphics link to it. By this, I mean having the colours match, possibly the font if there is any. Doing so will create cohesion and consistency on your feed, making it visually pleasing and ordered. This instantly gives off a great first impression and is likely to make people stick around.

Get a Great Grid

The type of content you cover will largely dictate this part of your visual branding, but there is some leeway with it. Depending on what you do, it may be more achievable to have all your feed posts look very similar. But the main thing to focus on is colour palette, types of shots you use and backgrounds. If you’re photographing products, be sure to present them similarly in each post. This will make it clear that they are yours and are available to be bought in one place – your online shop. However, if you’re a gig photographer it might be about how you edit your photos. Not all gigs are going to look the same, and that’s fine. You might produce super crisp clear shots, or really lower the saturation, or go for more action shots. Whatever it is you like to do, stick with that and that will contribute to your branding on Instagram.

What’s in a Name?

A lot, actually. Your username is going to tell your audience who you are and what you do. You want to keep this is as clear and simple as possible. Don’t worry about being original or entertaining with this aspect of your Instagram account, you need to be searchable. Now, the next field you can fill in on your Instagram profile is your name. Many people will just put their username again here, or their real name. Which is absolutely fine, but a slightly missed opportunity. This part of your profile is also searchable, so get friendly with some keywords. A simple “Musician” is perfect if you’re a session musician or composer looking to expand their audience and get connected.

Use Your Voice

The way you speak to people heavily impacts on the impression you make. This is true in life, but also online. Tone of voice is all part of building your brand and allowing people to get to know you and what to expect. If you aim to appear serious and professional, then sticking to a neutral tone may be best. However, if your brand is all about energy and fun a more friendly and casual approach would work. Whichever route you take with this, keep it consistent. You may have started to notice a trend here: consistency is key. Once an audience has got to know your brand and tone, they will want to be given what they are comfortable with. If your brand is humour and light heartedness, keep those followers laughing.