In order to remain competitive in your market, you need to constantly evolve. Part of evolving includes changing up your marketing campaigns and the images that are used in those campaigns. If you fail to evolve, your images and brand become stale. People become familiar with them, and they lose their effectiveness. However, evolving in the marketing world can be tough. Paid ads are becoming much more competitive, and content creation is flooded.
Consumers are inundated with images and ads everywhere they turn, and as such, they are paying less attention to these marketing techniques. In order to grab their attention, you need to improve your marketing campaign by using the right images. The right images will capture your audience’s attention and emotions, helping you to stand apart from your competitors. Here are three tips on using brand photography to improve your marketing campaigns.
Always Tell a Story
One of the best ways that you can use brand photography to improve your marketing campaigns is by telling a story through it.
Each and every day, people see images everywhere. They see images on billboards as they drive, on car wraps when they are at stop lights, on their smart phone when they check their social media pages, on the television when they sit down to watch the news, and on the Internet when they log in to their computer. Images are everywhere, and with so many out there, most people have become accustomed to quickly taking in the image and then tuning it out if it doesn’t speak to them. In order to captivate your audience, your images need to speak to them, and the best way to do this is by telling a story.
There is an old saying out there that an image is worth a thousand words. Before you place an image that is being used to represent your business, think about what words it is conveying to your potential audience. Your brand should have a story, a purpose, a reason, and a why for what you do. And this needs to shine through in every piece of media you place in front of your customers, especially your visual content.
If your image does not convey to your audience what your story is, it likely won’t captivate them and your marketing campaign may not have the impact that you were hoping for.
Use Photos of People
The second tip for using brand photography to improve your marketing campaigns is to use photos of real people, but only real people.
Studies have shown multiple things that you need to know when creating photography for your marketing campaigns. They show that consumers prefer photographs with people in them over photographs without people in them. However, studies have also shown that consumers are expert at picking out the difference between authentic photographs and stock photographs. And people have a strong preference for real, authentic photographs compared to stock photographs.
Eye tracking studies have been done numerous times and in numerous ways to see where the eye is drawn to when shown different types of marketing campaigns and images. Time and time again, the eye is drawn to people, followed by other images on the screen, followed by words. While words may contain more information than a picture, people spend more time looking at pictures, especially on webpages, than they do reading the words below the images. As a business, this is important information to keep in mind when you are creating a marketing campaign. If you can catch the eye and hold its attention, you can help potential customers and clients see exactly what you want them to see about your business.
Actually Use Your Photography
The last way to use brand photography to improve your marketing campaigns is to actually use your photography. This one may sound silly, but some companies actually invest in photographs and then fail to use them. When you invest in branded photography, it is critical that you include those photos in your digital, print, and website marketing campaigns now. Here are a few statistics that may drive this point home:
- “When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.” Including imagery helps you stand out to those who you are marketing to. If you don’t include images, they may not remember the information you told them, no matter how relevant the information was to them.
- “4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.” Consumers do not want to read a pamphlet or spend time reading article after article on your website. They want to be able to get the information they are looking for as quickly as possible. And videos are one of the fastest ways for them to obtain this information. When you are using branded photography to improve your marketing campaign, be sure to include videos as well.
- “Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images” and “Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.” Social media is huge for marketing right now. And clearly, social media posts with images receive more engagement and interaction. If your posts to your customers don’t include images, they are less likely to engage.
All of these statistics drive home the fact that photography and images are important to your marketing campaign. This is why it is so important to work to obtain the right images to represent your company and then use them in your marketing campaigns.
Marketing to consumers is becoming more challenging. People see images and ads everywhere they are turn, so they are becoming more accustomed to tuning them out. But with the right brand photography, you can help to improve your marketing campaign and draw people in. Three of the ways you can use brand photography to improve your marketing campaigns includes:
- Always telling a story
- Use photos of real people
- Actually using your photography
If you need help creating a visual brand identity, or updating yours, be sure to download The Who, What and How of Creating a Visual Brand Identity infographic today. It will help to answer the questions you have about using images to improve your brand identity and ensure yours makes an impression on your targeted consumer base.
