The visual appearance of your brand across various platforms, such as social media, ad spaces, your website, and more, is a large part of your brand’s recognition among both potential and current customers. Your brand’s visual identity has the power to reflect your brand’s personality, message, and value to your prospects. So, it’s essential that it showcases it well.
In a competitive marketplace, you need to present yourself to the right audience, the group of people who are most likely to interact with your brand, and you need to stand out from all the other companies doing the same thing. But in a visually saturated marketplace, how can your brand stand out?
Custom brand illustrations can help you take your branding game to the next level. You can put out content that’s creative, eye-catching, and truly unique to your company, business, entrepreneurship, idea, and more.
Having custom illustrations in your identity and marketing gives your brand a visual edge in a highly saturated market. The brand illustrations you want can go so much farther than those found on vector stock websites when you work with a talented brand illustration artist.
But what exactly are these illustrations, and why should you use them?
Let’s dive in.
What Are Custom Brand Illustrations?
Custom brand illustrations are a visual way to communicate your brand personality and message to your target audience. They can help to set the visual tone, making your brand identity more accessible across platforms and marketplaces.
These assets are incredibly strong visual presentations of tones, brand personality, ideas, and specific messaging. Customized illustrations work online, on social networking platforms, and for materials like magazines, books, merch, and more. It’s their adaptability that makes illustrations such a powerful tool.
Types Of Custom Brand Illustrations
There are several types of brand illustrations. Here are just a few of the options.
- Mascots
- Merch Illustrations
- Avatar Illustrations
- Storybook Illustrations
- Custom Line Art
- Product Illustrations
- Website Illustrations
- Email Illustrations
What Can Custom Brand Illustrations Depict?
Portraits
When you want to jazz up your employee or about us section, an illustrated portrait can lend a lot more personality than your standard headshot. Because these portraits can be tailored to the style your brand prefers, you can create a unified look across all the portraits for a cohesive feel.
Abstract Concepts
Illustrating an abstract concept or something very specific can be much easier than trying to find stock imagery for it or describing it via text.
Illustrated Or Cartoon Style Logos
Cartoon logos can be particularly fun and welcoming for a certain type of brand. You can also use illustrated logos to create something unique for the brand when standard icons and minimalistic formats don’t reflect the brand. Think about creating a custom type for a company name framed by a hand-drawn image with a watercolor-like effect.
Mascots
A cartoon-style mascot illustration can symbolize your brand and make it feel more down-to-earth, charming, and laid back.
And so much more. You can learn more about it here.
The Benefits Of Custom Brand Illustrations In Marketing
Illustrations are unique, attractive, and different from the typical stock images that people see on social media feeds, banners, and even on websites. They set your brand apart and allow you to create a style that’s unique to your brand and company. What’s more, you can connect with your audience by using thought-out, detailed illustrations in a way that stock photos just can’t.
Below are some of the advantages of using custom brand illustrations in your marketing plan.
1. Create Brand Awareness
Getting people to know and recognize what products or services you offer just by coming across your brand’s visual presence is a challenge. Good marketing makes it quick and easy for anyone to get to know your brand.
For instance, “wellness” can mean any number of things. It can be difficult to get people to imagine exactly what you mean by wellness. So, an illustration can help to depict your brand promise and message more effectively.
Marketing visuals also need to be more than just aesthetically pleasing. They need to inspire people to take your desired action and help your target audience visualize and feel specific emotions that you want to be associated with your brand. By using personalized, completely unique illustrations, you can achieve these goals more efficiently.
2. Add More Character To Your Brand Or Campaigns
In every industry, there are a handful of powerful, recognized brands. These brands showcase strong personalities and use marketing strategies that ensure that their personalities are expertly reflected throughout their marketing copy and visuals.
Illustrations add character to your brand and the promotions you’re campaigning. They can give you a distinctive look and feel that the competition doesn’t possess.
Setting a visual style for your brand by incorporating your brand colors and other design elements into a style guide can provide illustrators with the perfect base to work off of, but achieving the same effects with stock visuals can be much harder. Getting relevant stock visuals that are consistent across all your branding is tough and time-consuming.
By defining a visual style, you add more depth to your brand’s persona. All these assets can tie together to create campaigns that can improve sales and boost customer engagement. When you choose a particular illustration style or even an illustrated character for a campaign, you can utilize it across your promotional materials- both print and digital.
When you attach a specific version of your brand illustrations to a specific event, promotion, or campaign, you can also help customers easily spot when you’re addressing that specific campaign and when you are acting as you normally do.
3. Uncomplicate Complicated Concepts
Brands share informative content through blogs, videos, social posts, etc. It’s one of the best ways to get information about you and your brand to people because they’re already on the web looking for answers. In fact, 90% of people find new brands via YouTube, and 33% of people read blogs to learn about something.
How-to videos relevant to your industry, informative blogs, and useful evergreen content significantly boost your site traffic. What’s more, by consistently producing informative content that offers value as a reliable source of information, you’ll become a trusted industry expert people go to for opinions and answers. By proving your trustworthiness and know-how, you’ll build brand confidence.
One of the best ways to increase the value of your content is to include custom illustrations that clarify and attract. When you want people to understand instructions, illustrations, and text can work together and increase effectiveness by a staggering 323%.
Illustrations in your explainer videos can keep your budget on point because you won’t have to film additional footage or hire performers, which can be expensive, and when you’re creating blogs, illustrations will ensure that visual learners can retain the useful info in the content.
4. Illustrations Help Create Memorable Ads
Getting people to act off an ad usually comes down to how the ad makes them feel. What’s more, the ad needs to leave a lasting impression on your customers to ensure they remember you and how you made them feel.
Illustrations help achieve this.
These visually memorable designs get people talking about your brand, and digital illustration can help you create any design from scratch in the exact way you need.
5. Branding Through Storytelling
Whether you need to highlight your campaign’s purpose or show what your brand stands for, storytelling can achieve your needs easily. Illustrations make stories more engaging, and incorporating custom illustrations can help your story grab and hold more attention.
With illustrations, you can create a series of connected designs that can accompany packaging designs and social media posts with seamless continuity. You can depict your value proposition or how your service works by illustrating a story of the steps.
You can even show the difference between the different product lines through a set of illustrations on packaging designs and across web pages.
All these situations can increase brand engagement, and getting your customers to take action is the key to success.
6. Align Your Designs With Your Customer Persona
Your visual marketing needs to not just represent your brand but also give your audience something to relate to. This is another place where stock images just don’t cut it.
When you know what types of visual triggers work best for your brand, you might have very specific needs, and finding stock imagery that can fit the bill can be quite challenging. Worse, because the images are stock, a competitor in your industry could be using the same image. The odds are actually pretty good that they are if your industry is in a smaller niche.
For example, if your business is geared toward health-conscious businesswomen between the ages of 20 and 40, and you’re putting out a blog or introducing your service, you’ll likely want an image that depicts that ideal customer. With such strict requirements, it can be hard to find a stock photo that meets your needs. Illustrations can be your best bet.
How To Get Custom Brand Illustrations For Your Brand
Not everyone has a professional graphic designer or illustrator on their staff who can help create custom brand illustrations. The skill to create a unique image that captures a brand’s personality and possesses all the requirements to be used across platforms isn’t something everyone has.
For individual creators, smaller entrepreneurs, and brands that are just starting out, hiring in-house can be too far outside an already stretched budget. When you’re looking at freelance marketplaces, it can be hard to find the right person for the job because you can’t vet their quality. Worse, the timeframes for completion can vary significantly. Because your illustration will be something you’ll use consistently across many platforms, you’ll also need to ensure you receive the correct files. What if you don’t know which file types those are? Can you trust a freelancer to provide them all without you asking?
Additionally, you could wind up settling for something you don’t love if you don’t have the skills yourself or the funds to hire an artist directly. Stock photos can only take you so far, and it’s possible the competition will be using the same images.
When you want talented illustrators for an affordable cost, a flat-rate subscription service can be a much better choice. Even better, when you work with Flocksy, you’ll get several more services for your branding, including custom logos, characters, social media ads, videos, and even copywriting with the all-in-one creative service platform.
A Flocksy monthly subscription provides the professional work you need for an upfront fee. You can focus on other important jobs, knowing your custom brand illustrations will do everything they need to for your brand.
The no-contract, all-in-one format also puts all your creatives under one roof. No more juggling a graphic designer, illustrator, video editor, and freelance copywriter.
Getting Your Custom Illustrations At Flocksy
With Flocksy illustration services, beginning a “custom brand illustrations” project is easy. From the intuitive dashboard, you can start a project and get results in as little as 24 to 48 hours.
So, how do you kick off your custom brand illustrations project?
First, click on the “Create new project” button on the main dashboard to go to the project request page. Then choose “custom illustration project,” and from there, you’ll want to find the option for custom brand illustrations. This option will cover a broad spectrum of illustration needs and requests that don’t quite fit into the other categories. You can also find options for avatars, mascots, characters, and product illustrations.
When you’re starting your custom illustration project, be sure to include as many details about what you need as possible, including which illustration styles you like, your inspirations, your brand personality, and what tone or feelings you want the illustration to evoke.
Your illustrator will be able to create something truly unique and impressive when they understand your brand’s purpose, style, and personality. You can work with the same great artist over and over again whenever you need brand illustrations, ensuring consistency and style across campaigns and assets.
Soon, you’ll have a professional brand illustration ready to use across your marketing that’s drawn by someone with the skills and know-how to create something beautiful, impactful, and unique. For the highest quality and most effective custom brand illustrations, work with the team at Flocksy.
From illustrated logos to custom typography to character and product illustrations, our team can handle it all. At Flocksy, we’re thrilled to help guide brands toward their best brand identity now and into the future, so start your custom brand illustrations project today.