The Power of Visual Language: Why a Strong Visual Identity is Key to Successful Branding
Branding is all about one thing: ensuring that your company is the first choice for every single prospect and customer.
In an increasingly visual world, however, it’s no longer enough to rely on a traditional branding strategy, you need to embrace the power of visual language and ensure that you have a solid visual identity.
The greatest companies are already doing it
Consider brands like Disney, McDonalds, or Coca Cola. All three of these brands have logos that are instantly recognisable, and their visual branding is so strong that it’s often easy to identify them based on the first letter of their company name alone.
Granted that creating a font from scratch and then registering it as part of your branding process isn’t the right choice for every company, ensuring a specific font is consistently used to represent your brand could be an effective choice.
The idea is to ensure that your brand can be instantly recognised, whether that’s through the logo or messaging you choose, or the font that you use in all of your communications.
A strong visual identity improves brand awareness
With this in mind, a strong visual identity is also instrumental in improving your brand awareness. Your goal needs to be to design a logo, write messaging, select a font, and choose brand colours that set your business apart from all of the competition. Do this well and your brand will be at the forefront of people’s minds.
When we consider that attention spans have dropped at a consistent rate over the last few years, the fact of the matter is that you may only have a couple of seconds to capture the attention of your prospects.
Having a effective visual identity means that your target audience is more likely to recognise your business and the services and products that you’re offering.
It gives your company a personality
A strong visual identity can help to humanise your business and give your company a personality that your customers can relate to on an individual level.
Think about a brand like Innocent Drinks. Their visual identity means that they have a fun and quirky personality that their customers want to engage with and embrace. This in turn leads to increased sales, high engagement across all of their channels and lots of organic, word of mouth marketing on top of this.
Client loyalty is key
Client loyalty is decreasing at a rapid rate. Most companies lose around 45% to 50% of their customers every five years. A strong visual identity can help to address this and reduce these numbers – which is even more important when you consider that winning new clients can be up to twenty times more expensive than retaining your existing ones.
Speaking to your clients on a regular basis encourages the growth of a strong bond between them and your business. This is exactly the kind of thing that we can see when we look at Innocent.
They choose to use their visual branding in such a way that it drastically improves not only the bond they have with their customers, but ensures that they won’t go elsewhere and will remain loyal to the company in the future.
