If analysis paralysis finds you more often than you would like when it comes to trying to ‘brand’ your content across all these different marketing channels… this is for you.

Bad Branding Advice from A Brand Designer

How are all these brands and creators able to keep their branding across all of these different marketing channels?

How are they able to do it all by themselves or with such a small team?

At the end of the day, you just want to get some answers as to how to make your brand come across cohesive on difference marketing channels without just copying and pasting.

We struggled with this for a long time. Not just with our own brand, but with those of our clients…

One of our longest standing clients went through a massive re-brand (logo, fonts, patterns, website, imagery, etc.) While we handled their social media, youtube channel, and photography, we were left with 100 questions about how to integrate this into their other marketing channels cohesively?

So we asked to see how some of their other clients had ‘successfully’ branded their content moving forward after they launched. When we finally got the examples they weren’t what we were looking for..

None of the examples their clients showed created content at scale or that the way they styled their new content to match the branding made any difference in reach on social media. Also, none of these clients were on YouTube. Here’s why we were so disheartened.

We were posting 1 reel a day, 1 static post a day, 1 YouTube video a week, and a blog post a month. Not to mention we had 6 months of archived reels that we had a system in place for repurposing. We were a content generating machine with sponsors paying us for our content. The clients that were shown had a couple thousand followers, barely made any reels, and didn’t do it consistently.

Finally we talked with the designer who created the branding and asked for their advice on this matter. Using the new brand guidelines they wanted us to create a thumbnails for each reel, include the fonts when used on video, colors, and patterns… that’s a lot of work when producing as much content as we were for our client.

Needless to say we couldn’t meet those expectations and we told out client as much.

Practicality of Branding Across All Marketing Channels

Most of us are already producing as much content as we can. To add such a high standard to each piece of content is too much.. and that holds true for a business whose service is to produce content.

Budget and time are your two biggest constraints when trying to implement something new into your content, especially if that something new has you doing a whole new step that is very time consuming and doesn’t fit well into your workflow.

So how did we move forward from this?

Here’s what we did:

• We had our clients wear more ‘on brand’ colors during our content shoots. This way we wouldn’t have to edit them in with fonts or graphics later.
• We only use the brand font for static images on social, as the font is not easily readable for YouTube thumbnails or to be overlayed on video.

That’s it…

Out of all the new branding that’s all we changed. But why?

We were already successful at what we were doing. The content was already good and resonating well with our audience. Branding is simply to help connect better with your audience and become more easily recognizable when seen in different areas.

It was clear after we took some time that the branding seen on all these different marketing channels can be subtle. Maybe all you include is one brand color background on the ‘hook’ of your reel. Maybe all you do is change your caption color, to be your font. We just realized that the branding changes that we were struggle to make didn’t make a positive impact on our content being recognized. If anything it made it harder to be consumed.

Our rule for implementing new branding or new techniques into our content creation process is simple. Content creation can easily take up more time than it’s worth and we are constantly aware of that. So the rule stands:

“If it doesn’t easily fit into our workflow, we just need a little more creativity and time to make it happen.”