Social media content is a powerful way to connect with your audience, showcase your brand personality, and drive engagement. But how can you create content that is both consistent with your brand guidelines and creative enough to stand out from the crowd? Here are some tips to help you balance brand guidelines and creativity in social media content.
Your brand voice is the tone, style, and language that you use to communicate your brand identity and values. It should be aligned with your target audience, your goals, and your industry. Your brand voice should be reflected in your social media content, from the captions to the hashtags to the emojis. A clear and consistent brand voice can help you build trust, loyalty, and recognition among your followers.
While brand guidelines provide a foundation for visual consistency, creativity is the ultimate path to capturing the audience's attention. By infusing creativity into brand-aligned content, organizations can not only engage their audience but also distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace. Balancing the structure of brand guidelines with the flexibility of creativity allows businesses to maintain a brand identity while adapting to evolving audience preferences and market trends. Creating content that resonates with the audience while adhering to the brand guidelines that align with creativity is key to achieving this balance.
Your content pillars are the main themes or topics that you want to cover in your social media content. They should be relevant to your brand, your audience, and your objectives. Your content pillars can help you plan and organize your content, as well as ensure that you provide value and variety to your followers. For example, if you are a fitness brand, your content pillars could be workouts, nutrition, motivation, and testimonials.
In my experience, starting out by designing a well researched and comprehensive content calendar ensures you inculcate everything that a brand wants to talk about, supports and promote with its audience. Once that is in place, you get enough room to be creative in how you wish to present that content to ensure engagement within the brand’s guidelines.
Social media platforms offer a range of formats and features that you can use to create engaging and creative content. You can use videos, stories, reels, live streams, polls, quizzes, stickers, filters, and more to showcase your brand in different ways. You can also leverage the trends and challenges that are popular on each platform, as long as they fit your brand voice and content pillars. Experimenting with formats and features can help you attract new followers, increase reach, and boost interaction.
One of the best ways to balance brand guidelines and creativity in social media content is to analyze your performance and learn from your results. You can use the analytics tools provided by each platform, or third-party tools, to measure and track your key metrics, such as impressions, engagement, reach, followers, and conversions. You can also ask for feedback from your followers, either directly or through surveys, polls, or reviews. Analyzing your performance can help you identify what works and what doesn't, and optimize your content accordingly.
Another way to balance brand guidelines and creativity in social media content is to seek inspiration and collaboration from other sources. You can follow other brands, influencers, or experts in your industry or niche, and see how they create and share their content. You can also collaborate with them, either through partnerships, sponsorships, guest posts, or cross-promotion. Seeking inspiration and collaboration can help you generate new ideas, expand your reach, and grow your network.
Curate content with a human touch and don't limit your creativity to your brand guidelines. It's important to be authentic and human in your social media content because people can spot a fake from a mile away. This means sharing your brand's story, values, and personality and choosing which content or brand story should be highlighted.