The primary responsibility of marketing is to make the brand known. That includes acquiring as many customers as possible. To get your branding strategy up and running, you need to make your brand stand out from the competition. How? One idea is to create and develop a strong brand awareness campaign.
But in today’s digital industry, creating strong visual branding is not easy. Things can change from one day to another and people are bombarded with too much information on every channel, with every click.
So to be recognizable, you first need to be memorable.
Did you know that you’re 65% more likely to get your written content noticed if you pair it with a visual?
This means you need to think visually if you want to grow your digital brand. If time and money aren’t on your side – like in so many marketing departments, you need to find tools that can help you do your job the best you can.
This is why I want to introduce to you five tools that can improve your visual brand awareness, save your time and money, and also help you acquire new customers.
Enroll in our free email course to spruce up the rest of your content marketing strategy next!
Desktop tools to grow your visual brand:
Use Piktochart for infographics
Many big brands use infographics in their social media or content strategy to gain more visibility and drive more website traffic.
According to CMI research, 63% content marketers in North America said that infographics are the most effective tactics for B2C organizations.
Think about this: do you want more website traffic, more shares, and more engagement? The solution might be infographics.
Yes, they can be crucial to online presence, but you need to understand the two important factors of a successful infographic: design and promotion.
If you don’t have thousands to pay a designer to create an infographic for you, then you can easily use an infographic maker like Piktochart.
It’s so useful for any marketer who doesn’t have the design skills to totally DIY and doesn’t have time to start watching tutorials and learn how to create an infographic wireframe. You can use Piktochart’s tools to pick your color scheme, add graphic elements, and create other resources you need for an infographic – everything you need is in the app.
Just sign up, and you can start editing their free infographic templates (along with other document templates). You can also upgrade your account and use all their professional templates.
Tess Brooks, a Harvard MBA student uses it, and here’s what he thinks about the app:
“We knew we didn’t want just to produce blocks of paragraphs of text, since that’s not what resonates with 16-to-25-year-old women, and our infographics have been getting great feedback!”
Infographics can help your brand be a leader in your industry, by giving your audience the right information in an easy to consume content.
Create gifs with Giphy
Maybe you want to show a customer how to make that update on your app, or just help them understand with your tool.
Maybe you want to get a little silly and include a reaction gif in your social post.
These little visual touches can be funny, but at the same time very useful. To understand how many people use GIFs, think about these stats:
- 23 million gifs are posted on Tumblr every day
- Slack counts more than 2 million gif integration uses monthly.
- They might be small files, but do not underestimate them. Gifs are huge.
So, why not use an app where you can grow your visual brand awareness and stand out with some animation?
Giphy Capture lets you record anything on your Mac (sorry, Windows people) and make it into an HD-quality gif for free. You just need to download the app on your computer, click the Giphy icon, drag the window over the area you want to cover, and hit the record button.
Your brand can grow every time you help your customers save time.
Design banner ads with Bannersnack
Think about this: banner ads are visual marketing acting as a traditional print ad. The only difference is that you can click on them and get more information, or it can raise awareness.
There’s technically no difference between a banner ad on the New York Times, some local blogger, or the last sponsored post in your timeline. They are the same content, what differs is the audience.
Advertisers and marketers are still using banner ads to promote their products, services, and projects.
But they need professional tools to find great banner ad templates and design elements such as clipart, high-quality stock photos, fonts, and CTAs. This is why Bannersnack is a great app for every marketer and small business owner who wants to brand their paid marketing.
They also developed a tool that you can use to optimize your banner ads in real-time, by analyzing the number of views, clicks, and impressions they get. You can track the device people used to click on the ads, and pinpoint the exact location where your user is clicking on your ad.
If you want to grow your brand, you need to use smart tools that not only help you create content but also help you optimize it to convert.
Grow your brand on the go
But what if you’re traveling or creating visuals in the field? You can use the device sitting right next to you, your mobile phone. It’s 2016, after all.
So here are the two, simple, yet very useful tools you can use if you want to grow your visual brand from your smartphone.
Create behind-the-scene gifs with Boomerang
Whenever someone asks me how to showcase their “behind the scenes,” I give them the same answer every time: be different and be relevant.
Think about the mobile phone. You can do more today than just give a call, write a message, or scroll on Facebook. You can take pictures and edit them quickly, you can record HD videos and upload them instantly on social media. Moreover, you can run a business.
But what about gifs? Can you create gifs with a mobile phone? Yes, you can.
Because Instagram launched an app called Boomerang (available on iOS and Android) that helps you turn everyday moments into something interesting and unexpected. And those are two things you want your content to be.
All you have to do is to press the record button, and Boomerang does the rest. The app takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a high-quality mini video that plays forward and backward. You can easily shoot in landscape or portrait. Then you can share it on Facebook, Instagram and any other apps you want.
When you give your brand an emotional touch and share it with your community, it will help your brand awareness get to the next level into the user’s mind and heart.
To engage your community, you sometimes need to get more personal.
Design on mobile with Adobe Spark Post
Maybe you want to design something more complicated, but you don’t have your laptop with you.
I recommend a tool that Adobe launched recently – Adobe Spark Post, a mobile app that helps you create social graphics using customizable templates.
It’s currently free and available iOS devices (iPhone and iPads). When time’s your biggest struggle, you can use their “quick resize” feature to generate graphics for Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook using your content.
Brand all content formats
Growing brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, creativity, and determination. It’s like building any other part of building a business. You have to do it smarter, and that includes creating a brand that’s more than your logo and slogan. Including visuals in today’s content marketing landscape isn’t an option, so make them a part of your brand.
Visuals are often a key component of online brand monitoring, and can give you valuable insight into how your brand is being perceived.
Let me know in the comments what you think about these tools and which ones you use.
