So you want a sexy looking instagram feed? It’s not going to happen overnight and It’s not a great idea to try and maintain a consistent and aesthetically pleasing Instagram grid without considering your brand identity!
What I mean by “brand” is you, your products and the services you provide! The color scheme you choose for your brand or business will play a key role across your various online & offline marketing assets. From the way you create your own logo, to the design layout of your website all the way to your Instagram profile. Incorporating brand colors consistently across all platforms can result in a unified look-and-feel to your presence, making you memorable and recognizable.
To help you stand out with the right brand colors, ask yourself what brand is actually about? When choosing your colours it's important to consider what your vibe is. So ask yourself these questions:
- What's your story?
- Why are you doing what you're doing? (Don't say for money)
- What problem do you solve for your clients?
- Who is your ideal customer?
- How do you want them to feel when dealing with you?
- In what instances and spaces does your brand exist?
The answers to these questions will lay the foundation for knowing how you can use color to spread your message and your purpose. Colors are tied to emotions, memories and associations. Using this knowledge to choose the right brand colors is essential to your success. It’s important to not only take into account how each color looks on its own but also how they look next to one another.
No matter what your choice of color palette is, there needs to be a dark color and a light color for balance. These can be pure black and white, but can also be hues like slate grey and eggshell white. It depends on what visual representation you want to achieve. The number of colors your brand uses depends on what story you want to tell.
Choose one color, or at most, two that will be the base for the rest of your brand colors. They may just be colors in a visual sense but it's important to take notes of the HEX codes and RGB numbers that you can use repeatedly.
Now that you have the primary and secondary colors, it’s time to create some palettes. I like using an Adobe tool called Adobe Color. You can generate a color palette from one of your mood boards and adjust it accordingly. When you've decided on your colour palette, as mentioned take note of all the HEX codes so you can add them to a "Brand Kit". These are convenient to have on hand for whenever you need to use them again.
Below I've included my own colour pallete for reference. In the fashion and beauty industries, theres often heavy use black for sophistication and glamour, yet incorporating warm colors such as red, orange and pink for passion, confidence and excitement.
Similar lighting conditions can really mean a lot too, I make sure to have a similar color palette in all of my photos but what is equally as important, is to take all of your photos in similar lighting conditions.
So, you’ve chosen your colors, you’re being consistent with your lighting - now you can really start making an impact by limiting yourself to key filters. Using the same apps and filters to edit all of your photos is important, as it really makes them look similar, yet unique in their own way.
At the same time you also need to choose a theme to focus on. Mine is obviously my creative endeavours, and I believe you will be along the same theme but that doesn’t mean your posts have to be restrictive.
When you're establishing your presence, you need to consider a lot more than your individual photos. An Instagram feed is a mixture of images relating to one another, which means it incorporates individual images, as well as a grid of image thumbnails and it should tell a story.
You shouldn't stress too much about this or spend a great deal of time swapping pictures back and forth on the grid though, as I'm sure you have more imporant things to be doing! There's various apps to help you with this job also.
Personally I use Plann and I find it amazing. You can store a library of images there, along with sets of hashtags and the app tells you when most of your audience is online along with an auto post feature.
Planoly is another app that I haven't really vibed with but it's gotten great reviews so I thought I'd give it a mention. It's also an official Instagram and Pinterest Partner, which means your accounts in safe hands.
You should be using Instagram Stories as an ongoing "highlight" of your behind the scenes day-to-day stuff along with client interactions, so it can showcase your unique personality and work style. Using the ‘poll’ feature, the ‘swipe up’ option for links to your other content, and tagging companies to let them know you are talking about them are some of the easy ways to improve your marketing on Instagram. You can incorporate your brand colours into your highlights so your feed can look even more consistent. It's also a great idea to use symbols or images directly related to your industry brand.
If you pull all of these elements together, you’ll end up with a branded Instagram account that hits all the right chords online. When you create a consistent theme that expresses your brand ‘soul essence’ it means that your followers are instantly clear about your message and brand. It will create an connection with someone that is a fit for your product or services. That’s how powerful it is.
Leave a comment on this post letting me know your thoughts!
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