Building brand recognition with Adobe Express
Summary/Overview
You know the feeling. You see a social post on fitness coaching, an ad for jewelry, or a photo by a food influencer, and within seconds you know the brand. That’s the power of a strong brand identity. It’s a combination of consistency across brand colors and fonts, design aesthetic and style, as well as the placements and channels where they appear that create instantaneous recognition.
This is what we envision for your brand and business — to stand out in a crowded sea of content and be recognized and known for what you do best. Calling all artists, designers, entrepreneurs, and content creators: this is your time to shine.
Benefits of a strong brand identity
The first step to growing your audience is building brand recognition. In other words, you want people to connect with three aspects of your business: the brand name, the product offering, and the brand attributes (what sets your brand apart from competitors).
A strong brand identity gives you a bigger following to market to and a way to validate your products or services by seeing what resonates with your audience. It also helps establish trust and familiarity because customers like getting to know a brand and learning what to expect.
Consistency is key when it comes to building your brand identity and recognition, so you want all your social media stories, event flyers , digital ads, and designs to have a unified look and feel.
Enter Adobe Express: the fast and easy way to create consistent content to showcase your brand on social media and beyond. Choose from thousands of beautiful templates, then apply logos, colors, and fonts consistently across multiple pages of any campaign in a snap.
What does a strong brand identity look like?
Think about the brands you love and what makes them recognizable. For example, Burt’s Bees tells a charming, authentic brand story about its natural products using a distinct color (yellow), pattern (honeycomb) and imagery (honeybees) that all highlight the key ingredient: honey. The iconic logo features a black-and-white line drawing of the company’s founder, which gives it a classic, retro feel that’s friendly and approachable. Burt’s Bees social media posts include photos, videos, and product tips along with content about honeybees to reflect the brand mission and eco-friendly values.
One of the most widely recognized technology brands is Apple. From its minimal logo to alluring ad photography, every visual element speaks to innovation, creativity, and premium quality. The predominantly white and black background and simple modern font contribute to a powerful, futuristic aesthetic. Meanwhile, Apple’s Instagram feed is filled with crisp, vibrant photos uninterrupted by text. The content fits the social channel and is totally on brand for a company that sells sophisticated camera phones and tech products used by creative professionals.
The Sharpie brand is known for that familiar scripted font in the logo that has an artistic, handwritten feel. Its social media posts feature photos of creative projects with headlines that looks freshly scrawled in ink. A closeup of a marker tip. A pair of sneakers decorated with scribbles. Fast-motion videos of a drawing being made, start to finish. Together, Sharpie’s text and brand imagery celebrate every stage of the creative process — the writing tools, the pages, the doodles, the finished work, and the studio environment.
Key elements of a strong brand identity
The most eye-catching and memorable content has multiple visual, typographical, and thematic elements working in harmony to tell a story. As you create new social media posts, banners, and digital ads for your brand, think about how all the pieces fits together.
First, you want a logo that is meaningful and visually appealing. It’s best to avoid including too many details or words so that your logo can be resized for larger and smaller designs while still being recognizable. Another good rule of thumb: your brand logo should contain no more than three colors. Keep it simple, impactful, and symbolic.
Second, pick a color palette that reflects your product or services. There are over 15,000 hues to choose from in Adobe Express, powered by Adobe Color, so play around and have fun with it. You can even dip into color theory to see which shades are complimentary, or color psychology to learn which colors are associated with certain moods and emotions. For example, did you know that blue connotes tranquility, calm, and intelligence? Or that orange is inherently energetic, playful, and optimistic?
Third, consider your brand typography. Design best practices suggest using a maximum of two or three fonts to capture your brand personality. Explore classic serif fonts, decorative scripts, bold block lettering, and sleek minimal types. Before committing, test out different styles and sizes to ensure the text is legible on each design.
Need help selecting a font for your social media graphics or YouTube thumbnails? Adobe Express provides font recommendations curated by design experts to help you find a good fit for your brand. From ultra-modern minimal lettering to elegant script, we’ll keep track of the fonts and templates you use most to provide even more personalized suggestions the next time you create.
Finally, make sure the tone of your messaging lines up with your brand mission and values. If you’re sharing important information about products and services in the healthcare, security, legal, or financial industry, you’ll probably want to use a serious, straightforward tone of voice (and a more subdued or traditional color palette). A social media post or headline that sounds tongue-in-cheek, could easily be confusing or off-putting to customers. On the flip side, ads for pet toys, beauty products, food, or fashion might benefit from more playful, clever messaging.
Apply your brand in a snap
Build eye-catching brands fast with intuitive features from Adobe Express. Find out how easy it is to automatically apply your text, colors, and logos in a few taps.
Tips for measuring your brand awareness and impact
It’s essential to understand your target audience so you can turn them into loyal customers and brand advocates who will sing your praises. How do you find out who’s aware of your existence? The good news is that you no longer need to rely on marketing agencies to do brand research for you. There are many easy and accessible ways to measure your brand awareness.
For starters, entering your brand name in the Google search bar provides an instant overview of how your brand ranks compared to your competitors. To get more in-depth data, try using the Google Trends competitive analysis tool to scan the internet for mentions of your brand, which you can track over time.
If you’re not already keeping track of your social media followers, now’s the time to pay closer attention to who is viewing and liking your content. See which photos and videos get the most engagement, then ask yourself what these posts (and followers) have in common. Posting at certain times or on certain days can also affect how many people respond.
Brand tracking software is a great tool you can use to generate monthly or quarterly reports. That data will tell you a lot about how well your brand, products, and ads resonate with your audience. It’s also easy to send your subscribers a simple brand awareness survey with three to five questions, then watch the feedback roll in.
Whether you do a deep dive or a quick tally of followers, make time each week to review how your brand is performing. Have fun looking for trends and patterns that can help inform your next design moves. The more you understand what’s working (and what isn’t), the better you can create new content that your audience will love and that will attract a growing fan base.
Feel a group brainstorm coming on? Collaborate and create branded content with your colleagues using shared templates and libraries in Adobe Express. Everyone on your team can print and share designs in a flash.
Looking for more ideas and inspiration? Explore the Adobe Express blog to learn from a built-in community of creators like you.