Using Instagram to Cultivate your Vision

Whether your branding skills are being used for a business or for your own personal brand, cultivating your Instagram is a near necessity in today’s digital landscape. Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms today and focuses primarily on the idea of visuals. Any kind of art can be easily promoted on the site, whether it’s music through Reels, visual art through photos, or even the written word through captions and the new Threads subset. Instagram is a great place to attract new clients and reach a wider audience.

However, in order to attract the right audience for your creative services, build interest, and represent your services to the best of your ability, you’ll need to cultivate a cohesive aesthetic on your profile.

1. Understand Your Brand

This step is perhaps the most crucial - ensure you have a thorough understanding of what you want your profile to communicate to potential clients. You wouldn’t want to portray a fun and sexy makeup brand targeted at women 18-25 the same way that you would portray services as a photographer who specializes in family photography. Understanding the personality of your offering helps you to project your images and creations the way you desire potential clients to view you.

Questions to ask yourself: What is my target audience? What do I hope my profile will achieve? Who do I hope my profile will resonate with? What is my profile’s central message?

2. Find your style

Now that you understand your profile’s personality, it’s time to figure out how you want to communicate it through your profile’s style. Your style ranges from the font you’re going to use, to the colors you’ve chosen, to the types of pictures you want to post. It’s important to have an established style and to ensure your social media is conveying your value and message!

Some topics for consideration:

A. What colors best define my brand? The colors don’t necessarily have to be your favorite, though we do recommend that you like them, since you’re going to have to work with them quite a bit. Your color scheme is one of the most important parts of your brand. Studies have shown that a signature color for your brand can increase recognizability 80%. If you’re having trouble choosing, a good rule of thumb is to have one primary color and two accent colors. You may also find it beneficial to look into color psychology and color theory to ensure your branding colors work with your brand’s central message

B. What fonts will define my brand? To keep it simple, you should have 1 primary font you can use and 2-3 accent fonts. You also want to make sure you use the same font for your logo that you use to market all of your products (remember! Brand recognizability!)

Your brand’s font may seem like a trivial thing to worry about, but think about it: on visual media sites like Instagram, appearance is everything. You don’t want to market yourself as a classy, upscale brand and use comic sans for everything. Instead, choose a font that you feel conveys your brand’s identity. Note: If you want a pretty, swoopy cursive font for your main font, that’s totally fine! But make sure that the secondary fonts are easy to read and go nicely with the primary/logo font.

C. What type of aesthetic am I hoping to cultivate? Is your brand maximalist with an emphasis on bold colors? Or is it minimalist with an emphasis on the human form? Is it focused primarily on creating a dream-like vibe for your clients? Or is it more grounded, earthy, and realistic? Your brand’s aesthetic identity should line up with your brand’s values. For example, if you’re a zero waste brand, you likely would veer towards using minimalistic images that were more grounded in a clean and natural version of reality. You likely wouldn’t want a maximalist/consumerist aesthetic, as it would counteract your brand’s message. Make sure to ask yourself, what kind of pictures align most closely with your brand identity? Top Tip: You can use Pinterest to create a vision board as a guide for yourself and your employees.

3. Cultivate the aesthetic

Now that you know what your brand is, what you hope to accomplish, and how you want your design to look, you’ll be able to start the cultivation of your brand’s aesthetic. Remember, the key to an aesthetic brand Instagram feed is to keep things relatively uniform; even maximalist aesthetics with bright colors can ensure that your brand is cohesive. If you’re not sure how to go about that, here are our top tips:

A. Create templates. Templates for your posts and stories can help unify a brand’s aesthetic. Use your brand’s fonts and colors to create a template that can be utilized by yourself and your employees for multiple purposes. If you’re looking for a place to start, Canva and Adobe Photoshop both have templates that can help you!

B. Story Highlights. Your brand’s story highlights should also have a cover photo. You can create your own using your brand’s colors and font so it doesn’t look out of place on your profile.

C. Use a filter. Instagram has many options for filters that you can use to make your pictures match. If you can’t find one on Instagram that you like, apps like VSCO, Adobe Lightroom, and Canva can help you edit photos to ensure they match.

Now that your instagram is going to be cohesive, plan out a strategy session to bring your Vision to life! Aesthetic isn’t everything; posting consistently and ensuring your stories are active can help draw attention to your brand, as well.