From Static to Dynamic
Have you heard of a social media stylist? 🕶️👌🏼😏 Let’s talk about the elevation from Branding to Bonding: ❤️🔥 That’s the power that comes when you translate your static brand into dynamic content styling 👠
Having a static brand identity is not enough in today’s digital landscape. Your brand needs to shift and change depending on the environment it exists. This means Here’s how to do that…
Today, having a brand identity (traditionally a logo, a few fonts, and a color palate) is not enough. That’s because we don’t live in a static two-dimensional newspaper print word.
Your brand lives online:
We experience your brand in a dynamic digital world. That means it needs to be treated as a living, breathing asset that shifts and changes depending on where people see it. When it comes to social media, that means multiple different platforms with tons of content touchpoints.
Your brand needs translation into content styling for every piece of visual content you create. When you do this you’ll build a better bond with your future clients and customers. You can’t just slap a logo onto posts and videos or stick to the same old visuals, colors, and fonts every time. The reason you can’t is that it doesn’t work! And why it doesn’t work can be summarized into one word: habituation.’ work. The reason it doesn’t work can be summarized into one word: habituation.
The problem of habituation
If you think your logo makes people care, think again. Doing the same thing across all platforms loses effectiveness because once someone’s seen something a few times, they become blind to it. This refers to the psychological phenomenon of habituation.
Habituation occurs when a person is repeatedly exposed to a stimulus, such as a visual or auditory cue, and they gradually become less responsive or interested in it over time. This is because the brain processes familiar stimuli differently from novel stimuli, and with repeated exposure, the brain becomes less stimulated by the familiar… As a result, people stop noticing or paying attention to things they’ve seen repeatedly, even if they were once considered novel or attention-grabbing.
This phenomenon has direct implications for your marketing and advertising campaigns. So you need to continually find new and creative ways to keep your audience engaged and interested. The same old static brand visuals won’t cut it!
From Branding to Bonding
This section includes two short podcast episodes to give you extra context into content styling.
Pause to listen.
The Pinocchio Story
(and the magic of marketing in bringing brands to life)
Your brand needs to be dynamic, evolving, and adaptable to meet the changing needs and expectations of your audience. To achieve this, you need to have a practical application of your brand identity across multiple touchpoints of content, by translating it into content styling. When the content is enticing we start to bond with it and that makes us actually want to keep interacting with it.
So your content needs to look different depending on where it’s at. So from your website to your blog, to your social media platforms to your email campaigns.
While the beating heart of your brand personality stays the same, you’ll dress it for success differently depending on its environment. That’s what content styling is all about.
The Little Black Dress:
undressing Content Styling for your brand
What is Content Styling
Content styling refers to the consistent and strategic use of design elements, such as fonts, colors, shapes, textures, and imagery, to create a cohesive and recognizable visual identity for your branding application onto content.
By applying these design choices across all of your brand’s content, including social media posts, website pages, email campaigns, and more, you create an engaging and memorable brand that resonates with your audience.
Translating your brand identity into content styling helps to establish brand recognition, increase engagement with your content, and reinforce your brand’s values and message to your audience. The consistency across all your marketing channels builds trust and familiarity with your audience and can ultimately drive more conversions and sales for your business.
Content styling includes the style guide for your:
- Personal Brand Photoshoots
- Page Style per Platform
- Office Space Design (especially relevant for online meetings)
- Blog Content (scroll to see examples in this post)
- Website Design
- Instagram Posts
- Video Content
- Profile Design
Brand Identity Example
A brand identity includes the visual and non-visual elements that represent a brand and distinguishes it. A basic brand identity typically includes the following:
- Logo: The logo is a graphical representation of the brand that is often the most recognizable aspect of the brand identity.
- Color palette: The selection of colors that represent the brand and are used consistently across all brand touchpoints.
- Typography: The selection of fonts and typefaces that are used consistently across all brand communications.
- Brand guidelines: A set of guidelines that ensure consistency in the use of all brand elements, including the logo, color palette, typography, messaging, and imagery.
Overall, a brand identity is designed to create a cohesive and recognizable representation of a brand that is memorable and resonates with its target audience.
Here is an example of a simple brand identity for Malva Media’s little sister company, Malva PR.
A more extensive brand identity (or what we at Malva Media call a Brand Bible) is required for content styling. This typically also includes:
- Brand messaging: The voice and tone of the brand, including key messages, taglines, and brand values.
- Brand personality: The personality and character of the brand, can include traits like humor, sophistication, or sincerity.
- Brand positioning: The unique position the brand holds in the market, including its target audience, competitive landscape, and unique selling proposition.
- Imagery: The selection of images, photos, and graphics that represent the brand and are used consistently across all brand communications. This is usually a mood board.
Understanding the brand tone, look, and feel gets translated into all the associated imagery through a mood board. The mood board is used to translate the brand identity into content styling.
Mood Board Example
Here’s an example of Malva Pr’s mood board based on the brand identity.
What’s an example of Content Styling?
In this post, we’ve highlighted a few visual examples of how Malva PR’s simple brand identity is translated through a mood board into content styling for:
Blog banner content.
Here are some examples of blog banners for Malva PR’s Press blog.
Additional blog images used inside the blog (and re-used as Pinterest pins) are not detailed here.
One piece of content styling then gets translated into multiple social media touchpoints. Here’s an example with one blog banner resized as an Instagram post, Instagram reel and Instagram highlights button.
Repurposed Content Styling from Blog Banners
Hundreds of pieces of content are required for your brand’s primary touch points and each of these visuals gets repurposed into multiple social media content posts so that you’re able to connect with your audience and draw them back to the original placement.
Additional Reading
If you’re interested in translating your brand identity into content styling, email tv@ilovemalva.com for details.
Or visit Create Business Academy for DIY options.
