Your brand’s Instagram aesthetic will be the first thing that potential customers get to see when they visit one of your commercial social media profiles to have a significant impact on both their opinion of your business and your reputation accessing the internet. Curious on how to have an Instagram aesthetic that stands out?
Putting considerable thought and effort into your Instagram aesthetic can benefit your brand in so many different ways, either encouraging users to stay and explore your page or forcing them to click back and seek out one of your competitors if your aesthetic simply isn’t up to scratch.
Perfecting your Instagram aesthetic will help you to draw in and attract as much attention as possible. Still, it isn’t always easy to achieve or maintain a top-standard social media presence.
Many businesses pour an excess of funds and time into their social media presence yet get nothing in return, all thanks to their lack of aesthetic appeal.
What Is An Instagram Aesthetic?
Instagram is essentially an image-sharing social media application that’s based solely on images and videos. The branded content that you post gets added to your profile page to create a ‘feed’ of posts in small thumbnail icons for all to see.
Whenever a user clicks on your Instagram profile, they will see a stream of your post’s side by the side in rows and columns, as this table of images that you see is known as your ‘aesthetic.’
Having a jumble of random colors, patterns and fonts will make a terrible first impression, as you need to maintain some kind of theme or style to look authentic.
This theme or style should reflect your brand’s personality and help get your message across to your customers visually.
You can easily attract your target audience when the right Instagram page aesthetics is utilized, as they’ll be interested in your content as soon as they spot your posts on their feed or explore page.
Choosing your own ‘vibe’ will allow you to create a kind of virtual shopping experience, as each user will feel as though they are browsing through your online store when they scroll through your tailor-made posts.
Remember that your aesthetic should be centered around the products or services you offer.
Unfortunately, it’s common for brands to get carried away and focus too heavily on graphic design trends rather than selling their wares and therefore making a profit.
So, where can your brand begin its Instagram aesthetic exploration?
Understand Your Competition
Checking out the competition is one of the best ways to begin your aesthetic journey, as these are some of the pages that your customers will visit should they be searching for your products or services.
Scrolling through their posts will give you a better idea of what visual techniques work for your target audience, as you can identify color palettes, themes, and many more essential features that you can adapt to utilize within your aesthetic.
Taking the time to make the most competitive analysis tools such as those provided by Hootsuite and Ahrefs will give you access to big data that you can use to improve your Instagram profile aesthetic.
This will allow you to analyze your success and compare it against your main competitors to identify areas that require improvement.
Creating spreadsheets containing details such as colors and fonts can give you the information you need to make the best decision for your Instagram page.
Remember that your Instagram page shouldn’t be static. It needs to be changing and updating regularly, so there’s always an opportunity to improve and progress with continued investigation and adaptation.
Know Where Style Is Heading
Whether it’s fashion, interior design, or Instagram aesthetics, style is always cyclic. What goes around often comes back around, as you’ll likely spot through the use of 80’s vintage styling and Britney-Esque noughties aesthetics that are currently taking aesthetic social media by storm.
Knowing where style is heading can give you a real edge over your competitors online, as you can be the page that sets the trend by updating your aesthetic to suit the next craze before it even hits.
Many commercial Instagram pages remain unoriginal because they maintain similar aesthetics, such as ZARA and H&M, whose posts could easily be confused with each other if logos were not present.
Though this can be successful if the right theme is chosen, it’s often far more likely you’ll attract attention if you spice things up by adapting your style to remain unique and therefore recognizable.
Instagram has been a popular platform since its release in 2010, taking the world by storm and amassing a whopping 1 billion MAU’s (monthly active users). It took a team of developers just 8 weeks to create the initial application, but it’s been under constant construction ever since.
Every year new features are added to the platform, including:
- Stories – short video clips or photos that remain on your profile for 24 hours
- Reels – are short clips (similar to ‘vine’ for those who remember)
- IGTV that hosts longer videos and programs as well as a ‘shop’ marketplace where brands can sell their products through their pages.
Don’t forget to learn everything there’s to know about Instagram video length before jumping into it since each video option comes with different timing requirements.
Instagram has surpassed many other popular social media and photo-sharing platforms due to its commitment to creating and following trends and styles. Its adaptation to suit a more commercial marketplace has pushed its profits to record levels.
Learn everything there’s to know about Instagram video length before jumping into it since
Planning Is An Art Form
Firing out unplanned posts will cause all manner of grief for your Instagram aesthetic, as you need to have a solid style and theme that takes time and effort to preserve.
Planning your Instagram posts is truly an art form and takes a considerable amount of patience. Luckily, many different professional planning tools like Asana (Asana Alternative) and Trello support you in mapping out your creative process to organize the most suitable approach.
Most successful commercial Instagram pages plan their posts well in advance, sometimes photographing and editing weeks or even months before they are going to post.
This can seem a little tricky, especially as a small business that doesn’t think so far ahead but making the most of a collaborative whiteboard platform that encourages your team to jot down ideas will give you a source of inspiration you can create the perfect content.
If you need inspiration in terms of color, style, and theme, signing up to Pinterest will be of real benefit.
Pinterest allows you to create your own set of mood boards from a vast database of millions of images and resources, so it’s the ideal platform for those seeking to master their Instagram aesthetic.
Don’t be afraid to utilize as many tools as possible during your planning process, mostly when posting video content since it’s far more complicated than a simple image post.
Planning allows you to see the final product of your hard work before it heads out to your customers, allowing you to spot mistakes and improvements before it’s released onto your feed.
Taking the time to map out the direction in which you wish to head can keep you and your social media team on the ball, as you’ll always have something to work towards, and having your future in mind allows you to ease your customers into a change more gently.
Scheduling your posts in advance won’t just help you maintain a consistent aesthetic, but it will also help you post on a regular basis, which is essential when you’re trying to build your page and attract more followers.
Test, Test, and Test
Testing your Instagram aesthetic will give you a better insight into just how effective your content is. There are many different options that you can explore to examine your aesthetic with ease efficiently.
In reality, you’ll get an immediate reaction from your followers as they will choose to either:
A) Ignore your post and keep scrolling
B) Like your post and perhaps leave a comment.
The more likes that your post can receive, the more successful your content has been. The more views that your video gets, the more popular it is. If you attract several negative comments, then do not be upset.
Utilize these negative comments as creative criticism, taking the chance to improve on your weaknesses and turn the negativity into positivity in the future.
Instagram maintains a wealth of features that let commercials users view data surrounding each of their posts, with the most effective page known as ‘insights.’
These insights help to measure the impact that your marketing efforts have on your audience.
Insights tells you how many accounts your profile and posts have reached, how many people have interacted with you, and how much your total followers have increased in a set period of time.
This can offer up a brilliant data set to guide you in the right direction towards the most effective Instagram aesthetic.
If you don’t wish to go as far as posting your content to perform your tests, you can make the most of a range of other tools and testing options that allow you to assess your potential success before you decide to add the image or video to your schedule.
Utilizing a focus group that you can send your potential posts to will give you a range of varied opinions and feedback, which can help you make your posts more suitable for today’s market.
Testing your posts’ effectiveness after several weeks or months of them sitting pretty on your page can encourage you to make the right visual decisions in the future.
You’ll be able to see what works for your aesthetic Instagram profile, pushing your engagement to peak levels and motivating customers to shop with your brand each time they scroll past one of your posts. All this results in customer loyalty, and that’s exactly what you want.
Measuring the impression you have on users will show how much influence you have over the market, helping you push further and surpass your competitors with a strong social media aesthetic.
Figuring out how to perfect your Instagram aesthetic has never been so simple when you can take the time to utilize the brilliant tips and tricks that have been carefully described above.
It’s never going to be a risk-free ride in the park as it takes time and effort to learn how to master the art of social media marketing, but making the decision to commit to maintaining a strong, stylish Instagram presence is the first step in reaching success.
Always start your visual journey by assessing your competitor’s social media pages’ main selling points, as this will give you a better look into what your target audience likes to see and how you can adapt this to suit your unique brand.
Next, take some time to investigate which direction style is headed, utilizing past and future trends to keep your brand in the loop.
Focus on creating a detailed plan that projects weeks or months ahead of time, allowing you to organize and schedule your posts to stay active and meet your customers’ expectations.
Testing thoroughly is an essential step, so don’t skip over your final responsibility! Gather a focus group that can assess your posts before they are released onto your page, and utilize the insights page on Instagram to see just how much influence your posts have on your followers.