Chapter 30. Choosing your visual branding, the new world of marketing is increasingly visual. So it is no surprise that social network sites like Instagram and Pinterest are growing fast. So how can you as a hospitality property owner influence and increasingly visual social atmosphere by applying a strong visual branding strategy for your property on social media? visual branding on social media refers to what your content looks like images of your property, your profile picture your cover photo. Excellent visuals on social media platforms are important because the human brain is wired to read and understand images better and faster than words and visual content increases social interaction.
According to a social Baker study, images on Facebook constitute 93% of the most engaging posts compared with status updates. And links. So what do you have to do? There are four key components to help you improve your visual branding, social media success, consistent colors, fonts, imagery, layouts, consistent colors. Take a look at any well known company brand. And you'll see they use the same colors in all their marketing in their logo, text and images.
It is okay for you to use the same techniques. When deciding on your visual branding. Take two to three colors and use them through all your social media and marketing by using the same colors over and over again, customers will become familiar with your properties brand. Think of some huge brand and check out their websites to see what I mean. Hewlett Packard DHL virgin Microsoft as I discussed in an earlier chapter, color plays a huge rule in influencing what we do and purchases because we are visual creatures. The colors you pick should reflect your property's brand.
Once you pick your colors, you should know their color code or hex code. If you're not sure what it is, visit HTML hyphen color hyphen codes dot info, find your color on the HTML color picker, and your hex code will show by the hash mark symbol. By knowing your hex code, and using them in all your marketing and social media, you'll be able to use the same colors over and over again, fonts. When deciding on your properties font, choose ones that reflect your properties, image and personality. A boutique hotel owner would probably not want the same font stylings as a hunting lodge. Think about choosing three fonts for your brand and using them consistently throughout your marketing font for your title or heading, a font for your subtitles, and a font for your body text.
Your title or heading font would be your designs largest font, the one with most personality, and your subtitle and body fonts should be easy to read. If you'd like to get some ideas I've mentioned in an earlier chapter, a free program called canva.com. And they have an excellent parent font guide. You can find it@canva.com slash learn slash v hyphen, ultimate hyphen, guide, hyphen, hyphen, font, hyphen, pairing, imagery. When using images, make sure you stick to a consistent theme. And by that I mean the same type of look.
You don't want some images blurry for effect and then others with a red tinge. Some companies might use a fuzzy edge and all their images or some filter to give the pictures Summary field, I'm not going to say one is better than the other, but whatever you choose, stay with it. If you're going to be using your own photos, stay consistent with your theme. I do highly encourage you to use images of your property as often as possible. But understand that might not always be possible every time you post. If you're going to mention attractions or things to see in your region, use those images.
Again, canva.com is a really good resource. This platform has a library of over a million images and is super if your budget is tight layouts. Each social media platform has different image dimensions, which can be really confusing and time consuming. If you're designing the layout yourself. Have you looked at some of the pages on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and wondered how they made them look so great. Well, the owner could have been a graduate of a graphic design school or hired a professional to create it for them or used Canvas dot com.
I'm serious. When I say this program is amazing, you can have professional looking pages up in no time and at most, it might cost you a couple of dollars. If this is all relatively new to you, don't waste your time trying to create each page on your own. Use canva.com and keep the placement of your logo, colors and fonts consistent across all your designs. Okay, that's the four components you need to know for visual branding. In the next chapter.
I'm going to look at blogging