How to Create Your Personal Brand’s Visual Identity

Visual branding is the most effective way to create a powerful online presence. If you don’t believe me, check out this article on why visuals are important in marketing:

When half of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision, from day one it is our primary sense for understanding the world around us. With 70% of visual receptors in our eyes, it only takes 150 milliseconds to recognize and symbol and 100 milliseconds to attach a meaning to it. Our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text and retains 80 percent of what we see versus just 20 percent of what we read.

Source: Megaphone Marketing

As the purpose of any brand – personal or corporate – to be recognized in the niche, creating strong visual associations is the only way to go.

1. Create a Logo that Creates Positive Associations

Your logo is more than just a way to make your blog pretty. A logo is going to be well-integrated into all your digital marketing assets, from social media updates to videos. A logo is also attached to your search snippets in Google and – if you do your job well – it is something that may get recognized and prompt more clicks:

logos in search

Recognizing the fundamental importance of a logo is a good first step when coming up with a good one.

Luckily, these days you don’t need to invest in expensive graphic design services to create a logo. There are multiple tools that allow you to create a professional logo yourself. It is also a good idea to get feedback from employees and customers on your logo and associations it triggers. Setting up a scored survey is the easiest way to do that.

If you are just planning on establishing your brand online, you can have your logo for free when setting up your site. Namify is the service that will generate your brand name for you as well as help with the logo design. Here’s one I created for myself and it took me two seconds:

Namify

Namify stands out in the crowd of other domain generators by its ability to come up with meaningful (and hence easily brandable) brand name ideas.

2. Set up Your Visual Marketing Consistency

These days we have to deal with dozens of marketing channels in a hope to find our audience. These include social networking platforms, search engines, video sharing sites, etc.

Do you know what’s the best way to appear to be everywhere at a time?

Get consistent with how you look.

When starting out a decade or so ago, I made sure to:

  • Use the same profile picture for my personal channels
  • Use my logo as a watermark on all images and videos I’d publish
  • Stick to my branded colors whenever I could

Before I knew it, I was named a social media powerhouse. People thought being on forums and social sites was all I was doing all day long.

But my secret was simple: I was just super consistent with my visual branding.

And the science concurs: Visuals are the best way to build a memorable brand.

When we try to remember something, a picture always comes to mind. We evolved for images, not words so it is natural to tie an image to a memory.

Not only do we remember things visually but we remember visuals much better than we do words. This is explained by Pictorial Superiority Effect that describes our brains’ ability to retain visual information much easier than textual information:

Pictorial Superiority Effect

To build a consistent brand image online, consider creating a visual identity kit which would store your key brand elements:

  • Your logo (transparent png)
  • Your logo key element to naturally integrate into your assets
  • Your color palette

Creatopy has a separate feature for visual branding called Brand Kit, only it comes within their paid plans. It does save time allowing you to use your branded visuals within all your creations with just a few clicks of a mouse:

It also comes with a handy banner maker ensuring that all your banners are consistent in style.

3. Tell Your Story in a Visual Way

You want your story to go viral and attract attention and there’s nothing better than image marketing for that purpose.

Visuals can be a great addition to getting your message across while driving more engagement. You can create them by yourself or by hiring a freelance graphic designer to help you.

And for those who need extra help, there’s also the option of finding quality stock images from platforms such as Freepik, an online photo database.

And that’s where you can make your own personal story into your most powerful competitive advantage. Your story is what makes you unique and memorable, so visualize it to make it shareable!

There are many ways to share your personal brand’s story in a visual way:

  • Publish a series of Instagram stories and then turn those into a single highlight to always be there on your Instagram page (Here are some cool tools to create infographics)
  • Turn your milestones into a visual timeline and publish it on your About page. Don’t forget to use image SEO to get that image ranking for your brand name!
  • Create a dedicated board on Pinterest and share your story there
  • Turn your milestones and make a video slideshow to post in Youtube and Facebook

If you are wondering where to start, consider running your (or your competitor’s) brand name through Text Optimizer and create a visual story answering these questions:

These will allow you to create a visual story that adds search optimized context to your brand

There are many ways to visualize your personal story and it is a smart idea to experiment with many of them. Make sure to make your on-site About page the focal point of all those visual stories: Always link to your About page from everywhere. You can then turn the page into the most effective top of your sales funnel: The one that will convert those visitors into your customers or buyers. 

You can use Finteza to monitor that sales funnel and see it grow:

Finteza

Conclusion

In the age of information overload and with an adult attention span of 3-8 seconds, visual branding is more important than ever. Use the steps above as your initial to-do list and expand from there by growing your brand through content distribution and monetizing it.

Image source: Pixabay

Ann Smarty
Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, founder of MyBlogU.com and manager at ViralContentBee. You can learn more about Ann here.