It’s easy to get excited about expanding your brand’s online presence from blogs to websites to social media channels. Unless you’re going for some un-branded (or less branded experiences) it’s helpful to have some consistency across channels for look and feel.
First, consider your logo.
It’s your logo for a reason – it’s meant for people to recognize your brand without having to say your full name all the time.
Look at Nike and the iconic swoosh. They don’t have to put Nike all over their social channels, websites, and ads for you to know who it is. I caveat that this takes time for people to make this correlation and Nike has been doing this for quite a while.
Tip: Keep your logo consistent and use it across your social media channels and web presences (profile image, favicon, background images, etc) and email exchanges with your customer audience.
Second, ensure that the color theme of your brand is consistent.
For example, if your colors are blue and white, ensure your website, email messaging, and social channel backgrounds also have those colors. The more often you use them, the more often the logo and coloring are associated with one another – and your brand.
Tip: Look at American Express and their presence from the Open Forum blog to their Facebook presence. It’s all the same and easy to recognize.
Third, choose whether or not your look is clean and simple or vibrant and “out there.”
In my opinion, it’s easier to do simple and clean. However, some brands may go for something over-the-top to be seen out of the clutter of other brands in their category.
Tip: Whatever your choice, be consistent across channels.
To Read how I manage this for my own brand, check out my full post on Social Media Club.
Photo source: The Inspiration Room via TIME
Starting and maintaing a blog for your brand is a a crucial step when it comes to publishing content for your audience to discover, consume and share.
However, before pumping out all that awesome content, your team needs to determine how that blog will “look and feel” — how it will ladder up to the brand’s image on other owned sites, how the tone and voice will take shape, and how the blog will look visually to the consumer.
This shouldn’t’ be daunting, but it does take time to consider, plan, and strategize appropriately so your blog is a part of your marketing strategy and brand’s arsenal of content publishing.
1. To Theme or Not to Theme
Many blogs, whether it’s WordPress or tumblr offer a variety of custom themes that allow you to work within a set template.
The template allows for color changes, a preferred way to display content whether it’s the new Pinterest pinboard layout, or the gallery look, or keeping it simple with having it article style.
Whatever you choose, you can then add on widgets to allow for further customization such as social feeds, pulling in content from other sites, and even promoting products and services for people to purchase or subscribe to. In the end the theme helps those brands that don’t want to start from scratch, but would rather work from an easier starting place for a “look and feel” that fits the brand.
2. To Brand
Even before choosing the theme and the domain, it’s important to determine whether or not the blog will have branding specific to the brand/product/service. For example, some brands have a blog to offer fun entertaining content that has little to no branding; while others completely brand the blog with their name, logo, and more in order to show they are the authority of the blog and/or thought leader on the subject matter they are offering.
There is no right way to go about this, it depends upon the purpose of the blog and the goals of the brand. Both can serve great purposes.
3. To Be Social
If your brand has a large social presence or is trying to build on, it helps to cross promote social content. For example a fashion brand may want to pull in an instagram feed, while another brand may want to pull in a hashtag stream on a campaign they’re running.
I recommend ensuring there are social share buttons for content – more eyeballs, more consumption, more awareness of one’s content and brand.
4. To Provide Tone & Voice
One’s tone and voice is a part of the visual feel of the blog as well.
The tone can be fun and vibrant which goes along with a casual blog visually. Voice may be more instructional which may go along with a more conservative looking blog. Just remember to keep in consideration all the elements of your blog before putting it together.
5. To Provide Imagery
Imagery is essential to getting people to consume the content and share it. For example if it has fun visuals like a short video, comic strip, infographic – people are more likely to move towards it and in turn share with people they think would find it fun or informative.
Note: This post was originally written for social media club and my original post can be found here.