Boost Brand Awareness: Make Your Featured Image an Ad
When perusing the wide web for blogs of interest, you’ll find yourself lost in a sea of pictures. It’s standard for blogs to present themselves to the world with a photo—frequently having only a tenuous link to the topic—and an engaging headline. The images are eye-catching, but they’re not valuable, meaning they don’t boost brand awareness.
What if you turned that oftentimes unbranded photo into a brand awareness ad?
Think of all the customers to whom you could impart core messages, even without earning their coveted clicks.
All it takes is a little extra time and effort designing brand-forward featured images.
Let’s dive into the simple process!
Create templates that reflect your brand
The first thing you want to do when creating brand awareness ads for your company blog is design a few basic templates that you can customize for each article.
Don’t overcrowd your templates with an unfocused muddle of graphics and text. Keep them clean so the right details stand out.
Include your logo so as your messages sink in, customers have a brand to associate them with. Similarly, you can’t boost brand awareness if your featured image doesn’t properly reflect the style of your brand. Leverage your brand colors, font, etc.
And, as with all ads, include a CTA somewhere in the featured image to hopefully inspire customers to take that next step and open up the blog.
Choose key messages to boost brand awareness
With little space, you want to be as succinct and straightforward as possible. Other than the blog title and CTA, you don't need much else besides a one-liner delivering some of the key points customers would glean from your blog.
For the following featured image for our brand storytelling guide, we list three things brand storytelling can do for customers:
Just by looking at the featured image, you glimpse what we do (help brands tell their stories) as well as why it's important.
Brand storytelling captures attention, builds loyalty, and drives sales. Boom. If customers scroll on past, they still will have consumed that nugget of wisdom planted in STORYSOFT colors, boosting brand awareness.
Finish with an icon that amplifies your message
Once your copy is set, consider adding an icon to drive your message home.
Visual aids are beneficial to a lot of people. If customers don't remember the text of your featured image, they may still recall the icon, the message resurfacing in their brain, your brand with it.
For example, we added an icon of a doorway to another world to our immersive brand worldbuilding blog featured image. It's simple yet striking. It reflects the power of worldbuilding, as a customer could imagine stepping through it to that sunny stretch of rolling hills.
Again, without reading the blog, a customer's wheels will start to turn. Later that day, they might picture that doorway and wonder how they could incorporate worldbuilding into their own brand strategy. Maybe they'll search for blogs on the topic, finding your company again (if your SEO efforts have been fruitful).
Featured images doubling as brand awareness ads can add value to customers’ lives without them having to leave whichever search engine or social media platform they use to discover new blogs.
They also look professional. A customer might be more inclined to read a blog with a stylized featured image than one serving up a plain photo of a salad for, say, a blog about eating healthy.
The stylized image might paint you as a thought leader in their minds and not just another amateur blogger.
Thoughtfully stylizing your blog presents customers with a cohesive and consistent sub-world to nest seamlessly into your overarching brand world.
To boost brand awareness, you have to infuse your unique branding into all you do. A featured image doesn't have to be the exception.
Take that untapped potential and turn it into branded gold.
Create immersive, Instagram-style digital stories for your brand with STORYSOFT. Learn more.
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