MAX SESSIONS Hi, my name is Liz Mosley, and I am a branding designer and podcast host based in the UK. As a branding designer, I mostly work with small and indie business owners who often don't have big budgets when it comes to promoting their businesses online. So harnessing the power of social media to tell the world about their products and services is so important, and it's a brilliant opportunity for them to reach people who might not have known about them otherwise. In this session, I'm going to be walking you through how you can grow your brand on social media and also show you how Adobe Express is the perfect tool to make that process as easy as possible for you. Before we dive in, I just wanna say a big thank you to Adobe for inviting me to deliver this session and to be part of Adobe MAX. I really hope that you are having a brilliant experience of the conference so far and that you've scheduled lots of inspiring talks to watch. And thank you for signing up for mine. I really appreciate you being here and I hope you find the session valuable.
So first up, let's have a think about why you should share your brand on social media in the first place. Well, firstly, as I already mentioned, it's an opportunity to share your brand with potential customers and clients all over the world. There are currently 2.35 billion active users on Instagram, and that's just one social media platform. There are so many platforms for you to choose from. If Instagram is where you choose to invest time and energy, you only need to reach the tiniest fraction of that 2.35 billion for your business to be a huge success.
Social media is a mostly free way to market your business. This presents you with a pretty incredible opportunity. Yes, it takes time to grow a brand on social media, but we all have access to all of these potential customers and clients. Now, that doesn't mean it's easy because everybody else has access to that too. So the noise online of people promoting their businesses and their offers is louder than ever before. So when it comes to brand building, something that is key is working out what you can do to cut through the noise and really stand out. Something really helpful to remember though is that you don't have to appeal to everybody. In fact, it's absolutely better if you don't. If you do try to appeal to everyone, then the likelihood is it's gonna have the opposite effect of what you intended. And you'll probably end up with a very bland brand that's not gonna stand out at all.
Something I love seeing on social media is when brands are able to really cultivate and nurture a community of loyal fans. And again, I think social media really gives us an opportunity to do that in a way that other areas of marketing just can't. Through social media, we can actually speak to customers and clients, find out what they're struggling with, how we can help them solve their problems, and also we can really take them behind the scenes of our business. I think more than ever before, we want to connect with the brands that we buy from, and we're looking for brands whose values really align with our own. But in order to get those values across as brands, we need to be sharing those values really frequently and consistently through the content that we share online.
Social media is often the first place people will look for your business when they hear about it, possibly even before they check out your website. And so it's a really unique opportunity that shouldn't be missed to make the best first impression possible. But you don't have to be really active on all the different platforms. I would really recommend that you choose one or two that you're gonna focus on and go all in on, but you wanna be strategic about which those platforms should be. This is where knowing your target audience really well comes in handy. Where are your clients and customers? The ones that you want to attract and sell to spending most of their time? If you are investing all of your social media marketing efforts into Instagram, for example, but actually your target audience is spending a lot of their time on LinkedIn, then this isn't gonna be the best use of your time. This can take a bit of time to work out, but sometimes it's just a case of asking your existing customers or clients for a bit more information about them, find out what is their preferred platform, and it's also really helpful to find out where they discovered your brand in the first place. Next up, let's chat about some of the ways that you can grow your brand on social media. Now, obviously, there's only so much that we can cover in a 30-minute presentation, but I hope that some of these suggestions will inspire and encourage you, spark ideas and maybe help you to step out of your comfort zone and try something new.
So first up, be creative. I think one thing that is hard about social media is that obviously we get to see what everyone else is doing and it's really easy to then think we have to do what everyone else is doing and do it in the same way. But our businesses are all so different, and so actually we need to work out what works best for us. Now, obviously this can take some trial and error, and one of the best reframes that I've experienced as a business owner is thinking of everything I do as an experiment and getting analytical with it. One of my favorite ways to try and come up with inspiring and new creative ways to present my business to the world is actually to look at a completely different industry from mine and see what they're doing. Is there anything that they're doing that people in my industry aren't? That I could put my own creative spin on? Another way I love coming up with new ideas is to set myself a timer and come up with as many ideas as possible and not filter myself. I put down all of the content ideas, even the terrible ones, because sometimes it's the awful ideas that spark a really good idea down the line. Making time to be creative and show your personality with your social media marketing is so important. It might look like trying a different style of reel or collaborating with someone on some shared content to promote both of your businesses. You could spend a bit of time experimenting with one particular aspect of a social media platform. So Instagram stories, for example. Or maybe you could set yourself a challenge. I love to gamify everything. So a 30 day reels challenge, for example, and you could use the video templates in Adobe Express to make this quicker and easier. Maybe you show up in Instagram stories in a way that you normally wouldn't or include polls to really engage with your audience. Maybe you start incorporating some fun animations into your visual branding and your content to make your brand more engaging and exciting. My next tip would be to be generous with your content. So many of the businesses that I have followed that have really grown their brands on social media have done so by creating educational content that actually helps their target audience. This is the perfect way to build brand trust and loyalty because your clients or customers feel grateful for how you've already helped them before even buying from you. And it also gives them a taste of what they can expect when they do decide to buy or work with you down the line. Now, educational content is gonna look different for every business. So for me, as a branding designer, for example, it looks like talking to my target audience, small and indie business owners, about how they can make the most of their branding and make sure it helps them to achieve their goals. This could involve tutorials with design tips, for example. For a product based business, it's gonna look a bit different, maybe creating a carousel post explaining how their product is gonna help them solve a particular problem or how it's going to help them. It's gonna make their lives easier or happier. Maybe if it was an accessory business, it could look like creating some lookbooks and giving their customers outfit inspiration, so that they can feel confident about what they're wearing while always incorporating that brand's products in the look. This is helping their clients and customers find outfits that they love and making the shopping experience easier for them, so it doesn't take them as long. And then try and be relatable. People really bond and connect over shared experiences, and social media gives us a real opportunity to share those behind the scenes elements of our businesses.
My last tip, and the clue is in the name, is to actually spend time being social on social media. We have an unprecedented opportunity to chat to our customers and clients and find out what it is that they need and what they're looking for from us. But we can also support and champion other business owners. And also you never know who is watching what you're doing. Some of the best opportunities that I've experienced in my business have come from being friendly and helpful online, and then people that I didn't even realize were following me have recommended me for opportunities. There's nothing better than getting an encouraging DM or a comment from someone who really appreciates what you're doing in your business and the content that you're sharing online. And we need to make sure that we do that for other people too. Let's make sure that it's a two-way conversation and that we lift each other up, encourage each other and be social, build those relationships. One of the things that I love most about social media are the relationships and friendships that I've nurtured there and the community that I've been able to build around my business. It brings me so much joy, and I know that the same could be true for you too. And don't forget, as I mentioned before, it's the perfect place to get to know and understand your target audience and their needs better. Now, before we dive into me showing you Adobe Express and how it's gonna help you with all of this, I just wanna touch on a couple of points about the importance of consistency when it comes to your branding. So consistency in how your branding looks, but also how you show up online, the content that you share, how you interact with people, basically everything that we've talked about so far. One of the ways that really helps me understand why consistency is so important and how it builds trust is to think of your brand like you would think of a person. If you have a friendship or relationship with someone, over time they earn your trust by saying that they'll do something and then doing it. So it's a lot of small actions that over time build that trust to the point that you then feel confident that if they say they're gonna do something, they'll actually do it. Now, the same is true for our brands as well. We probably have experience in our lives though, where some people... that trust is broken and it takes a while for the trust to be built back up again. And so it's not to say that that person in your life or us as people or your brand has to be perfect all of the time. We all make mistakes. Things come up, traffic makes us late, we forget to do something. But the way we deal with the mistakes is the key to maintaining the trust. Again, it's the same with people as it is with our brands. We don't have to be perfect all of the time in our business and get everything right, but we do need to communicate effectively when something goes wrong or we miss a deadline or we don't do something that we've said we're gonna do.
Now, I think a lot of people, when they hear the word consistently, think that it means constantly. So we often think being consistent looks like posting on social media every single day. And, yes, for some people that will be an important part of their strategy. But it doesn't have to look like that for you necessarily. It might be that you decide to share one educational reel every Friday, and that's the only post that you share. People will know to expect it and will look out for it, especially if it's really good quality. Now, when it comes to your visual branding, so like your logo, colors, fonts, photography, using those consistency really help... consistently really helps to build up the brand recognition. We want people to be able to spot our businesses and our content as quickly as possible and for them to know if it's something that's relevant for them and something that they want to consume. And this in particular is where Adobe Express is gonna come in so handy because it's going to really help keep everything looking nice and consistent in a very easy way. We also want our visual branding to accurately reflect what our business is like, because going back to the whole building trust thing, we want to say we'll do something and then do it. So we want people to get an accurate idea of what they can expect when they work with our business just from looking at it. So this is a bit of an extreme example, but say you had a funeral director that used really bright colors and lots of fun animations. I mean, that is gonna be off-putting because that look and feel is probably not gonna be what you experience when you actually visit a funeral director. Something that really helps with this is asking yourself how you want people to feel when they interact with your business and then making sure your visuals and branding really evoke that feeling. So now that we've covered some of the key points on why consistency is important, let's head over to Adobe Express and I'm gonna show you how it's gonna help you as you grow your brand on social media.
So the first thing that we're gonna wanna do is create a brand kit, because as we've talked about already, keeping your branding visually consistent is really important. Now you can set your brand kit up directly in Adobe Express, and all you need to do is head over to your stuff, go to Brands and then click on Create Brand. But in this demo I'm gonna show you how you can create it from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to start with. So if you have designed your own branding or maybe you've worked with a designer, then this is a really great way to get all of your assets into Adobe Express. So I've got this fictional brand that I've created for a cafe that encourages kids to come along and play. And what I'm going to do in the libraries panel over here on the right hand side, I'm just gonna click on the plus and create new library. And I'm just going to call this MAX Play Cafe. So here's my library. Now I wanna try and keep this organized just so that if anyone else is working with this brand, they can find all the assets they need. So I'm going to create groups within my library to store everything that I need. So I'm going to start off with one that's called shapes. Then I'm going to create another group for patterns, and then I'm gonna create one for colors, and then I'm gonna create one for logos. You can have as many groups as you want and you can also have subgroups. So it kind of depends on how many assets you've got in your brand that you need to store. But I want to keep this nice and simple for the demo. Now you'll see that it prompts you here to just drag and drop element. So all I need to do is select my logo and drag it over. And I'm going to do this for each version, so that I've got them there and I can choose between them when I'm designing in Adobe Express. So let's just get all of those over. You'll see how nice and quick it is. So there we've got our logo folder sorted. Now, next up, we're gonna add the colors. Now I don't wanna drag and drop these because it's just going to add it as an asset, as a square. So what I'm gonna do is head to the plus button down here and I'm going to add fill color and then that's gonna add it as a color for me, and I'm just gonna drag it up there. So I'll just quickly do that with all of these colors, drag them into the folder and you'll see that everything is gonna start looking nice and organized. So let's just get all those in. It's very easy to move things around as well. You can see it's just very drag and drop, which is handy. And then we're gonna add these patterns, so I could drag this over or again, I could go to the plus and I could add this as a graphic. So there's always different ways to do these things. So let's just add this one in as well. I've just dragged that over and it's appeared. And then finally we've got our shapes, which again, I can just drag over and they will appear in this folder. Now, I'm going to add one more folder here as well, because we're gonna add photographs too in Photoshop. So let me just add a folder for those...
and I'll call it Photography. So now let me head over into Photoshop and I've got some stock images that I'm gonna use for this library. So all I need to do is scroll down and find the new library that I've created.
Here it is, and you'll see I've got my photography section. And again, it's just a case of dragging and dropping the photo over and it will appear in the library. I've got another one here. I'm just going to drag and drop that over. And so it's nice and quick and easy to do. So there we have our library set up for the Play Cafe brand. And what's really nice is because Creative Cloud is all synced together, this is now gonna appear in my Adobe Express account. So I'm going to head back over to Adobe Express and I'm going to click on libraries and then I'm just gonna... I have a lot of them in here, so I'm just gonna have to do a little scrolling through and you'll see that here it has appeared. So we have MAX Play Cafe. So what I'm going to do is click on that and you'll be able to see that everything is in there.
My photos have appeared not grouped, but we can, so... Oh, it's moved up now. It sorted itself out. So what I'm going to do now is actually use this as a brand because I wanna be able to access the colors and the logos from within the designs that I'm creating. So I'm going to click on use as brand. And what's that's going to do is it's going to move it over to the brands panel. So you'll see it's brought everything over for me. It's also given me a little sort of mock-up of what things are going to like. And it's kept it in my sort of organizational folders. But what I need to do now is I wanna make this my primary logo. So I'm just going to tag everything, so that everything is very nice and organized. So that's gonna be my primary logo. These are going to be tagged as secondary logos. So we'll just add tags to all of these.
We can also tag our colors. So I'm going to say that this cream color is gonna be our primary color, and then all of the others can be secondary colors. So you just need to go through and do a little bit of organizing, but you'll see that it's so quick to just get it all set up and ready to use.
And also you can then share this brand kit with other people. So if you are working as part of a team, you just need to head over to this button here, click on share, invite people, and then it's just a case of typing in the email address of who you want to invite, and you can send them a little note explaining what it is that you're sending them. So now that we've set up our brand kit, we can use all of those assets that we've added to actually start designing content for our social media in Adobe Express. So what I'm going to do to start off with is head to the big plus button in the top left and I'm going to make an Instagram story. So I've gone with a portrait size. First thing I'm going to do is change the background color and you'll see that already it's got the MAX Play Cafe, library or brand, sorry, I should say, there. All you need to do if you want to change this is just click on these two arrows and all of your brands and libraries will appear. But I am just going to pick a background color, and then I'm gonna head over to your stuff and go to brands and libraries. And again, straight away it's come up with MAX Cafe, MAX Play Cafe, and I can just grab the logo that I want to use and put that in place, and we can just go in and get all of the different elements that we want to include for our design. And you'll notice in the top left hand corner of all of these, there is a link symbol, and that means that if I was to go and update this design, say this pattern, over in Adobe Illustrator where I created it, update it in the library, it's going to update or prompt me to update when I come back to Adobe Express. So that is really great for brand consistency because it means that everywhere that I've used this pattern, it's going to update to the one that I want to have in the brand kit that I've created in Illustrator. So let's just add a photograph to this design. We'll keep it pretty simple and then we'll just add some of our shapes down here.
Now, it might be that you are working as part of a team, or maybe you're a designer working with a client, and sometimes you want to get their feedback on your designs. And something that's really nice that Adobe Express offers is the ability to collaborate on projects in real time. So I'm just going to head up here to invite and I'm going to invite my friend Lois, who is going to come and collaborate on this project. So I'm just going to say, "What do you think?" Invite her to edit. Now, in a minute we will see her cursor on the screen and we'll be able to see what she's doing and how she's editing the project. But before that, I'm just going to head to comment and I'm just going to write her a message saying, "Hey, Lois, what do you think of this design?" So you'll see her mouse has appeared now and she's showing up here. So I'm just going to click submit. And in a minute, her reply will pop up here and we'll be able to see what she's doing to the design. A fun little fact while we wait for her reply is that you can actually have over 1,000 people collaborating on a project. I'm not entirely sure what instance you might need to do that yet, but I think that is quite handy to know that you can have a lot of people working on a project at the same time. So...
here you can see her mouse.
Hopefully we'll get a reply from her shortly. And it'll just appear down here. And so you can just chat to each other as you're working. And there is the reply and it says, "Looks great. Let me just move a few things around." And you'll see that she's just moving the shapes around, which is great. Now, another thing that is really handy, so we obviously created this graphic within Adobe Express, but you can also start from files and designs that you've already made in other Adobe products. So for example, I created a flier in Photoshop and I want to be able to edit that in Adobe Express. So I'm literally just gonna drag the file over. You'll see here, it just is gonna take a few minutes. It's just evaluating the file, it's checking out all of the layers. And what's really nice is that it's going to retain the integrity of all the layers, so that we're gonna be able to edit those directly in Adobe Express, including being able to change the fonts and the colors and the photographs. So let's just wait a second for that to upload.
And you'll see it's pretty quick. So now we can open it in the editor.
And as I mentioned, the integrity of the layers has remained. So you can see all of those over here. The text has just moved around slightly, but I can easily just fix that and put it back in place. And you'll see that I can easily go in and change that. I can change the color of it. So maybe I'll make that a cream.
And so, yeah, all of these elements are editable. Now, another thing that you can do to make your social media posts a bit more dynamic or add a bit of personality is to add some animation. So what I'm going to do is just grab the asset that I want to animate, select it, I should say, go to animation, which is down here on the left, and you can animate how it comes in, what it does on the document and then how it goes out. For this, I'm just gonna animate how it comes in and I'm just gonna go for something really simple. I'm going to go for bungee. I'm going to change the duration because I want it to be a little bit longer. I want a few more bounces and I want it to come in from the left. And so you'll see already that's just making this a bit more interesting, adding a bit of personality. With this star, for example, we could have just the looping feature and we could make it spin around. So that actually looks really cute. And we could do the same again for this one. And as I mentioned that already this really adds in some really just playfulness and some personality that works really well with this brand. So now if I click play, you can see all those animations in action. And another thing that I just wanna quickly show you, which again is going to be a game changer as you're creating consistent assets and consistent posts for your social media is the resize function. So once you create a design that you're happy with, maybe you want to post it in a whole host of different channels or you want to make a flier out of it. All you need to do is go up to this resize button and it's pretty much a shopping list of what you would like. So I might want an Instagram square post. I might want to turn this into a story, maybe I want a YouTube thumbnail.
And, yeah, I mean, you can pick as many things as you want. Now, one thing you do just need to check, and this is something that I often forget to do, is if you want the image to come across as the background on all of the different sizes, you just need to set this as background. So if you... Oh, hang on, let me just set it as background. We've got a white box there, so just set it as the background. And now let's go back to our resize and we'll pick the ones that we want. Click duplicate and resize, and you'll see that immediately it has created all the different sizes that we need. And as we talked about at the beginning of the session, that consistency and keeping everything looking really on brand is so important as you grow your business on social media. So we have come to the end of the session. Thank you so much for joining me. I really hope that you found it helpful and learned something new. In particular, I hope you've come away with some new ideas of creative ways to grow your brand on social media. Remember, social media really is a great opportunity to nurture and create a community for your clients and customers. How you do this can be an experiment, try different things and then get analytical about the results and see what's working. And don't forget how important consistency is for building trust and recognizability for your brand. Make promises and then consistently keep them, and also keep your visual branding consistent. And this is going to really help you as you grow your brand. Finally, I just wanna really encourage you to keep sharing what you do with the world. Be bold and courageous. We need to see it. And there's just so many opportunities for creatives and small businesses to have a real impact, and for you to build a business that you love and a life that you love. And I really want to cheer you on in that journey.
If you would like to connect with me online, you can find me on Instagram and TikTok. My handles are @lizmmosley on Instagram and @lizmmmosley on TikTok. And I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to pop over, ask me questions, or just say hi. And thank you again for signing up for this session and spending the last 30 minutes with me. And I really hope you enjoy the rest of the Adobe MAX conference.