Fact: You cannot personally explain to everyone the reason behind your brand’s visual content. Social media platforms exist for a reason: to leave the judgment to online users on how they perceive your brand. Some businesses might forget about this business aspect but, how does visual brand affect your business?

But first, how do we define visual branding? In simpler terms, it’s your brand’s visual personality. Most of us are visually attracted by aesthetic visuals and user-generated content. Visual branding goes down to how people will remember your brand.

Two of the most common mistakes that businesses commit are: not investing time and effort to establish a cohesive visual branding identity and using the wrong visual brand elements or attributes to associate with your brand’s personality.

Some businesses have this kind of mindset:

“My brand is up online. I’ll post images of my products and services everyday. People will probably notice my brand by now.”

This is not right because your products are not the only things that people will be looking for. They want to know what value and proposition can your brand offer that will make you different from the rest. People look for something distinctive, and how your feed looks can affect how they see your brand.

Remember, how will people remember what you can offer to them if they don’t like what they see on your feed: low-resolution images, mismatched fonts or a spam-looking account? If you don’t put enough effort into how your visual content looks, people might tend to ignore your brand. Well, that doesn’t sound great especially for starting businesses.

On the other hand, some businesses tend to have this kind of aspiration:

“I want my brand to look exactly like *insert a popular brand* on social media. Maybe people will notice my brand more.”

Instead of determining what sets your brand apart, this kind of mindset often leads to becoming a shadow-like figure of that popular brand you’re mimicking: you become one of that brand’s face. You do not develop your own visual branding, which also affects an increasing positive capacity on how you can market your brand to your audience without looking like another existing brand.  

The Bottomline: Even if there are many industry competitors on the social media landscape, it all depends on what specific proposition would you want your customers to recognize from you and visual branding plays a very important role on making things happen.