Photos and Brand Consistency
Let’s face it, if you are not using photos, or images of some kind, on your web site and in your other marketing materials, chances are people are not going to read your carefully crafted copy.
Great photos are sticky and have consistently proven to be effective in getting your potential audience to read more about you. But, are your photos sabotaging your marketing consistency?
Three Brand Consistency Mistakes
Here are three mistakes that we see regularly:
- Bio Page Portrait Consistency: Often, teams of people get hired at different times or maybe even across the country or the globe! They may have used multiple photographers to get their headshots done. The result is an “about us” page that is stylistically all over the place, with varying levels of quality. At the very least, this will impact your retouching budget as your designer puts in extra hours to try to match color, lighting and consistency. At the worst, it can reflect on your brand and hint to people that you don’t know who you are as a company.
- Product Photo Consistency: The quality of the photography will directly influence the perceived value of the product. A good quality photo of your product will help your buyer understand how the product will work, how it will look in their hands and how it will solve their problem. Mixing good photos with amateur images can bring down the perceived quality of the whole catalog page.
- Location Photo Consistency: Your facilities are another part of your branding. Badly lit, sloppy snaps from a cell phone will not do anything to highlight the best features.
Every Picture Tells a Story... of your Brand!
Your story gets told through the images you use in your marketing. To raise and keep up your brand’s image, here are some tips:
- Retouching: Sometimes, you can improve the quality of a photo by using a photo editing program, like Adobe Photoshop, to adjust colors, get rid of backgrounds and improve the exposure. However, there is only so much that can be done and it does require time and money that may be better spent on getting a good photograph.
- Update Your Photos: Sometimes, you don’t have a choice about the level of quality in the beginning. But, as your company grows, update the photography, either by learning to do it better or by hiring a pro, to increase the perceived value of what you do.
- Create a style guide: Collect photos of similar subjects that inspire you and reflect what you want your brand to look like. Use this guide to make sure that any new photos, whether done in house or by a professional, match the level that best reflects your brand.
- Invest in your brand: Whether your brand is you or a whole company, your potential clients will only see the value that you show them. One good photograph is better than 5 crappy ones. Budget for better photography so that you can sell more.
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