Content creation can be hard. However, if you’ve gone through the effort of writing a solid piece of content for your website, why stop short and leave visuals as an afterthought?
Web imagery is too often overlooked as a valuable marketing tool for businesses of all kinds.
From lifestyle branding to trucking companies, clients and customers are visiting your website because they want to better understand who you are and what you do, and great imagery can help to communicate that on your behalf.
So, if you’re wondering where to start when it comes to choosing the right photos for your online brand, look no further, you’re in the right place.
Leverage Your Personas
Before you begin searching for stock photography, or capture photos yourself, it is essential to take the time to research and validate who your ideal customers are and what kind of images they may respond best to.
To truly strategize an effective marketing plan, you should be able to first detail a persona’s wants, desires, fears, priorities, and driving emotions.
What’s a persona? Great question.
A persona is a representation of the different individuals that make up your target audience. Personas give a quick snapshot of various demographics, goals, motivations, and frustrations with the aim of identifying what influences their decision to purchase a product or service.
As you validate these mock profiles with real-life clients and customers, it will become easier to identify images that will best match what your personas are looking for when they visit your website or interact with your brand.
Prioritize Emotional Connections
When we think about really impactful moments in our lives, we may not be able to remember exactly what the setting looked like, or what was said, but we will remember how the experience made us feel.
A great photograph captures energy, emotion, and storytelling without having to say anything through text. It communicates with the person who is seeing it through colour, balance, cropping, and action, or lack thereof.
Therefore, when we choose photos for a blog article, about us page, or a brochure design, it’s critical that we put a great deal of thought into how the image is supposed to make someone feel about a company, a product, or a brand.
By creating emotional connections through visuals, you are one step closer to reaching not only the interest of a person but also their deeper wishes, desires, and dreams.
For example, there is much greater magic, and more room for emotional response, in a photo of a small child opening a present from their mother on their birthday, than in a simple photo of the gift itself.
Receiving a special gift from a parent is something many people can recall and relate to. For many, a great photo can spark nostalgia, happy memories, and evoke positive feelings in having their own realities reflected back to them by a brand.
Be As Original As Possible
We can all get a little burned out after searching the internet for hours, either working or scrolling through social media.
So, it’s up to you to offer a little something extra that will keep people peeled to your page!
By choosing to use photos that are more unique to your brand, you have a better chance of catching someone’s attention.
While stock imagery can be a good option for some industries, capturing “real”, high-quality photography should always be the goal.
When people are able to see other real-life people interacting with your employees, walking around your real-life store, or sampling your real-life product, there is an authenticity factor that helps to make your brand more approachable and appealing.
Highlight Brand Colours
For those companies and organizations with strong brand colours and identities, incorporating brand colours into your photography is just as important as it is in your logo, website design, and brochures.
A full branding experience doesn’t stop at colour coordinated t-shirts, it filters through to each photo you use to represent your brand in the public.
Whether it’s increasing the blue tones in a photo or featuring someone in a green shirt, there is so much you can communicate about the professionalism of your brand through intentional imagery.
Quality Over Quantity
There is such a thing as too many photos. There, we said it.
With your personas and branding in mind, consider where imagery is needed or maybe not needed in your marketing efforts.
If a photo is simply being added to something because you think you have to add a photo, that’s wasted effort.
Instead, consider what visual elements may help to reinforce your content.
What goal do you have for your content that a photo could help you to accomplish?
