Your Marketing Photography Questions Answered

Consider this: when you first visit a website, what catches your eye first? The large photo across the homepage, or the paragraph of text sitting underneath?

For some businesses, stock images will serve just as well as original imagery and offer a broad range of content without having to schedule multiple photoshoots. For some, however, the unique experience that comes with original content will be well worth the initial expense of hiring a photographer.

This depends on both the purpose your website serves, as well as the content living on your site.

For example, if you offer avery specific service or product, stock images might not be able to communicate as effectively as original content. Additionally, the original content will be marked by your branding, including logos and brand colors that exist in relation to your product.

Consider the associations that people draw when considering your products or services. Will they be visiting your location frequently? If so, photos of the space will provide web users with a sense of familiarity beforeand after their visits, giving them visuals to relate to.

Also, if your service is very personalized, and clients communicate heavily with your employees, staff images are crucial. Putting a face to well-known names within your company develops comfort and familiarity, at the same time building your company’s image. I always highly recommend staff photoshoots for mid to large size companies because the unified style brings the page together, rather than having various background types and image quality levels.

The broadest differentiating factor between many photographers is their overall style. This is where you evaluate whether your brand and theirs agree and, furthermore, match each other aesthetically. For example, if you are running a coffee shop and your website makes use of dark colors, you might want a photographer that focuses on moody, rich tones. If you use bold, modern fonts you might want sharper, more defined photos to maintain that mood. On the other hand, if you were running a flower business, you would want lighter, much more vibrant photos to advertise the liveliness of your products.

My next suggestion is to look at their portfolio and see what other clients they are working with. For example, if this person’s portfolio is exclusively portraits, they might not be the best fit to photograph products on behalf of a business. The same goes for someone that primarily photographs still life subjects, they might not have the same comfort level interacting with living subjects as an event photographer. Again, this is where you evaluate your products and decide what kind of photographer you need.

It is incredibly helpful to your photographer to know the end destination of your photos before taking them. Photographers will develop and process images differently based on how they will be used. For example, if a photo will be used as a web banner the photographer will need to know in advance that the shot must be wide enough to crop down to thinned out dimensions. This is a great conversation to have early on because it can affect their equipment choices.

This is also a great time to discuss what you are hoping these images will communicate to your clients. If you want your focus to be product quality, lots of close-up detail images will be helpful for incorporation around the site. If it’s all about your one-on-one experiences, talk to your photographer about capturing those interactions so a client knows what to expect when interacting with your staff.

Together, you and your photographer can break down what you need to prepare for the shoot, from the people and products you’ll be featuring, to the best ways to prepare them for being photographed.

If we are building a custom website for you, these are the types of conversations we’ll have with you to ensure your site best serves your business or organization’s needs. We’ll walk you through content and layout recommendations to develop great user experience. To learn more about this process, check out our site or give us a call.