Branded Images Breakdown

Every business owner, marketing director, and customer wants a seamless brand experience. That usually means a consistent tone of voice, exceptional customer service, and clear communication of your product or service every turn—even on your social platforms before someone becomes a customer. One simple way to infuse your marketing with your branding is to utilize branded images.

What is a branded image?

A branded image combines your brand elements with the piece of content you are sharing to deliver visual information in a branded package. It adds an extra special touch to your online presence, infusing your brand into each interaction your audience has with your company.

Branded images also add a sense of professionalism to your feed. The extra effort in curating these posts to represent your brand is palpable to your audience. It creates a seamless experience with your company, down to the tiniest details. Either it is the cherry on top of a good experience someone has with you when they find you online, or it is a perfectly branded first impression when you first appear on their social feeds. Branded images don’t make or break your brand, but they are the je ne sais quois that shows your professionalism and attention to detail.

A branded image must contain at least one of the following:

• Logo
• Brand Colors
• Brand Fonts
• A custom image (a graphic or photo)

A good branded image most often has two or three of these. All four together can be overwhelming, but if done right it can work as well. 

Aspects of your brand that you can pull into a branded image are:

• Repeating shapes used in backgrounds, headers, or CTAs
• Color overlays
• Header styles and paragraph styles (as dictated by your brand guide) 
• Consistent backgrounds and/or borders you use on your website

Basically, anything you do anywhere else - like your website, print pieces, etc - can be redirected to fit for your branded images.

Where can you use them?

Branded images are very versatile. Use them across your social platforms to share content, in email campaigns, ad campaigns, and even on your website. Basically, anywhere you are sharing content with your audience.

Some great posts that turn into branded images rather easily are things like reviews, holiday posts, special deals and promotions, fun quotes or industry-specific memes, and important facts about your business. For example, instead of just screenshotting a google review and sharing it, sharing it in a branded format looks more curated and professional.

Making it happen

There are a myriad of ways to go about making a branded image. Apps like Canva and Adobe Spark have free versions online, and when you need more functionality you can pay for premium features. These apps let you create from templates and make branded images quickly and easily. Additionally, you can set up templates to ensure brand consistency each time you create a new asset.

Your marketing partner can also make these for you, and they will be more unique to your brand than an online version like Canva. It is more expensive to outsource the creation of branded images, but doing so will give you a more custom and creative solution. With our clients, we usually see their branded posts outperform a post with just a photo or link. (They all have their place and time, though that is a blog post for another time.) There’s an example of two posts below to show the difference. The top post is a branded image, and the bottom post is an article. The branded post’s reach was almost twice as high as the article.

Practice makes perfect, so don’t get discouraged! However, if you need some help making this work for your business, drop us a line. We love to chat anything social strategy.