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Whether you are a start-up company or a large multinational brand, a photo says a thousand words about your business. Customers and prospects will make a quick judgment about your company’s professionalism based on the imagery you are using to enhance your social media posts, website assets, presentations, or even email signatures.
Not sure if your photos are up to par with the vision you are wanting to portray? Here’s a quick guide to evaluating the media you are associating with your brand:
- Are you using high-quality photos? High-quality photos can be enlarged, reduced, and adjusted much easier than a blurry, low-resolution photo can. It shows a sense of quality and attention to detail to your customers and prospective clients that the imagery you are selecting aligns with your brand, as well as your company’s standards of business.
- Are you choosing a wide variety of subjects and environments? While your photos should be representative of your brand, having a bit of variety is a great way to break up a monotonous feed and provide personality to your content. This could be in the form of
- Are the photos you’ve chosen relevant to your business? The selection of stock photos can be overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking for. If you have a brand guide, try referencing your colors, or even suggested brand photos to find something in a similar vein. It’s also important for your photos to be relevant to the content they are associated with, so select timely photos that support your content rather than distract from it.
- Are the photos adding value to your content? It’s fun to include a meme or pop culture call out every now and again, but the photos you are using for your brand should be both relevant to the content and add an extra “oomph” to support the text. This could be in the form of slideshows, gifs, graphs/charts, and much more.
If you are looking to update your photo strategy, that is where stock photos can come in handy. They have a wide variety of topics, poses, backgrounds and overall choices to find the best photo for your needs. Plus, these high-resolution photos will help save the cost and time of staging and producing your own photoshoot to get similar end results. If you’re not sure if a stock photo will work in your design or content, nearly all stock photo sites allow you to download a preview or low-resolution watermarked photo to try as a placeholder.
The PIP Metro Indy team has a great list of stock photo website you can use for your next project that offer both free and pay-to-use elements. Here are a few of our favorites:
- iStock Photo: istockphoto.com
- Adobe Stock: stock.adobe.com
- Getty Images: gettyimages.com
- Shutterstock: shutterstock.com
- Envato Elements: elements.envato.com
- Vecteezy: vecteezy.com
- Pixabay: pixabay.com
- Alamy: alamy.com
- Dreamstime: dreamstime.com
- Reshot: reshot.com
- Unsplash: unsplash.com
- Pexels: pexels.com
Overall, stock photos can be a great asset to your company’s marketing and branding efforts if used correctly. Need some more ideas or need to discuss further? Give our expert team a call to discuss what you’re looking for and how we can help!