New year, new me – it’s the current theme for companies and individuals alike. It’s ok to want to start the year off with a new look but as a brand, you need to ensure this change is still in keeping with your established look. Drastic changes can alienate your current audience or affect your general brand identity.
Think about some of the most popular brands on social media such as Coca Cola or Starbucks. When you see their posts, no matter what market they are representing, you can immediately identify them. This is because they have an established look and they stick to it. While social media allows you to play around with your look a bit more in traditional media, it’s best to maintain a consistent look.
Here are a few tips you can apply when giving your social media pages a facelift.
Know Who You Are
As the saying goes – To thine own self, be true. Yes, this applies to brands too. See how the new look you have in mind stacks up to the previous look. If your existing content is completely different from your new approach then you need to ensure you have a set brand identity you want to establish and intend to maintain. Building a good brand reputation and brand recall can be a huge challenge if your audience is never sure of how you’ll be presented. Much like with brands like Coca Cola, you want to be the first brand that comes to mind when someone sees a particular colour scheme or symbol.
One simple way to do this is to create a mood board to help you decide. Include your existing look, the current trends and the goal you have in mind. Make the necessary changes as you go along to ensure that you are comfortable with the end product and that it achieves your objective.
Stick to Your Brand Guideline
All brands need to have a brand guideline. This is essentially a manual that directs how your brand looks, sounds and feels. This guideline will be a very important aspect of your first step as this will help you further establish your ideal brand look. While there are many trends that you can join in on, if they don’t align with who your brand is they won’t feel natural and could affect how your brand is received by your intended audience.
For instance, the current trend might be pastel colours and your brand’s palette includes purple, pink and blue. By using your brand guideline you can decide how best to incorporate the trending look or you might realize that this does not work for your brand at all. Pastels might give more of a casual feeling when your brand is meant to be more of an authoritative brand. The colours might be aesthetically pleasing but they do not align with your brand. In that case – move on to a new idea.
Checkout Your Competitors and Followers
Once you have an idea of the new look you’d like, check out your competitors, see how they represent themselves. You can also look at how other brands with a similar style are being received. Most importantly, look at how your own followers seem to respond to similar looks. Is this something they are drawn to? Is this new look appealing to a similar crowd as your current audience?
Often brands will change their look as they seek to appeal to a new audience. This is perfectly fine as long as it is done in a way that maintains the brand identity.
Can You Keep Up?
If you have scrolled through Instagram you would have seen the numerous accounts that have created beautiful grids using perfectly cut images to create a bigger picture when viewed as a whole. You might also be swayed by the colour patterns and want to try that yourself. While these add to the overall appeal of your content you need to ensure this is a look you can maintain. This will require very specific planning to ensure that only those set pieces are posted at a particular time. If your brand, for instance, often has spontaneous content to share you might want to avoid those big picture looks and use a colour pattern instead. This way you can simply look at the pattern and decide what needs to be used for your pop up post. If you really don’t think you can maintain a neat pattern then skip that and just focus on presenting great visuals – who says grid appeal is only about patterns?
Get it Right
The most important step in this process is trying out the new look. Roll out a few pieces of content and watch how they perform. Make notes, do a poll, ask for feedback so you can make an informed decision on how to proceed. If it is well received continue to monitor the performance of your page so you can adjust accordingly. If you don’t get the results you expected then there’s no harm in going back to the drawing board to get it right.
The Takeaway
There’s more to giving your page an overhaul than simply making new posts. You need to ensure that you have a plan in place and that your new look ultimately reflects who your brand is.
Ready to transform your pages? We’re here to help.
