Harkening back to cave drawings, to hieroglyphics, to oil paintings, and to social media photos, images and iconography have been employed to tell stories since time immemorial. Professional photographs are essential in creating the aesthetic of your brand. As incorporated in your web design, photography captures the attention of visitors to your website and keeps them engaged.
Professional Photography, unlike the written word, is easier to understand, appreciate and share.
Here are some recent statistics regarding imagery and audience engagement:
- Articles with relevant images average 94 percent more total views than articles without images.
- 60 percent of consumers who use online search say they prefer to contact a business whose listing includes an image.
- Nearly 70 percent of e-commerce website shoppers say the product image is very important when making their purchase decision. (Source: MDG Advertising)
Why Website Photography Matters
As you probably already know – but it bears emphasizing – visual content is extremely important in establishing your brand’s identity online. When visitors arrive at your company’s website, most of what they absorb is visual, and their initial impressions are formed almost immediately.
Superb photography of your products, services, staff, and building confers professionalism onto your business. You also reinforce the look and feel of your brand and your website. When you have beautiful photographs and eye-catching imagery, viewers are inspired to stay longer and dig deeper into your website as they become acquainted with your brand and your products and services.
In short, professional photography on your website plays an important role in establishing your credibility in the marketplace and invites visitors to interact with your content.
In order to stand out from your competition, and be accepted as a credible and professional business, exceptional quality design and superior visual content are absolutely required. This means you will need high-quality pictures for your website!
Importance of High-Quality, Professional Photography
The right images can mean the difference between success or failure for your website. It is important to know that websites are primarily a visual representation of your business – or your organization – and your brand. If you have low-quality images or poorly taken photographs on your website, you risk tarnishing the first impressions of your website’s visitors. What’s more, many users will leave, or bounce, from your website, if you don’t have legitimate quality imagery accompanying your copy.
It is a universal truth that high-quality, professional photography is as vital to your website as good marketing copy.
These are the most important reasons why your website needs quality, professional photography:
- Credibility: As soon as you upload an image that is pixelated, stretched out, or poorly lit, or, too small, you instantly lose credibility with viewers. These common stumbling blocks can originate from several issues. The most typical problem is your photos were taken with phones or other lower-quality cameras. Other reasons stem from using bad stock photos or old images that don’t have the correct resolution for Web photos. It is standard practice to always use high-quality images and photos, which consumers expect from legitimate companies and organizations.
- Customization: When you let a digital marketing agency take professional photographs for your website, you can choose exactly what photos you want and you can determine how the end product will appear. You have complete control, in collaboration with the agency you work with, which means you can customize the photography in specific ways that accurately, and in a compelling manner, tell the story of your brand. This is one reason why you should only sparingly use stock photography.
- Distinction: Another reason you should avoid using stock photos is that they can often appear sterile – failing to convey the personality and unique traits of your brand. When you use professional photography, you have the ability to capture the essence of your brand and communicate what it stands for. Whether it is professional headshots of your staff or photos of your products and services, you want the photos to represent the distinction and personal identity of your company.
A good picture may be worth a thousand words, to borrow from the popular proverb, but as it pertains to photography for your website, it could also be worth that many leads and sales! Beautiful photography can also significantly boost engagement with your products and services! Again, well-taken photos are vital in telling your story well.
Want more reasons why you should employ well produced photographs during the development of your website? Here are other benefits of good marketing photos and how they can lead to substantial growth for your company:
Photographs Make your Products & Services More Attractive & Enticing
Images and photos on your website serve as storytellers. They make it possible for potential customers to visualize what their lives would look like using your products or services. According to Mary Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of a recent study on consumer media behavior, the human brain can correctly identify images in as fast as 100 milliseconds. At the highest rate, people can view new images more than
20 times as fast as vision typically absorbs information.
Website Photographs Help Your Business Display in Search Engine Results
The benefits of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), are many and directly connected to the successful placement of compelling photos on your website. When you include search-friendly metadata and captions with your photographs, you are producing more content for search engines to index. This leads to your website content displaying within both web search results and image searches. This significantly improves the likelihood of consumers finding your business online!
Another way of increasing your chances of getting discovered by people who need your products or services is to allow local blogs and websites to use your images free of charge in exchange for a link back to your website. These are known as inbound links, and they are designed to raise your search ranking.
Website Photographs Can Heighten Your Presence on Social Media
High-quality photos can be pivotal to enhancing your stature on social media. For example, studies have shown that including at least one image on pages is associated with more shares on Facebook. Other research has found that social media posts that incorporate images have better engagement rates than text-only posts.
In order to fully leverage the brand recognition power of social media, make it easy for visitors to share your content by including buttons to immediately post to various social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram.
Connection Between Photography and Your Brand
It is important to note that all of your photos need to be “on brand.” That means they should express your brand messages, as well as the personality of your brand. For example, a fitness studio that is equipped with the latest machines and offers the most popular workout classes, will not be satisfied with merely having photos of the building and staff headshots. Photography for this type of progressive fitness studio should portray people sweating and exerting themselves as they strive to meet their goals. Action shots should capture confident instructors leading classes of satisfied people following precise movements and exact contortions with a lot of enthusiasm and grit.
By leveraging the power of photography, you visually demonstrate the value of your brand. Well-taken photographs allow visitors to your website to understand your products and services through unique visual narratives. You want consumers to bond with your brand in ways that are relatable and even aspirational.
Above all, you want to tell the story of your brand with customized, distinct photography. At its essence, photography is a medium for storytelling, and superior images have the power to captivate and inspire consumers to interact with your brand.
Nowadays, consumers, especially younger people in their twenties and thirties, do not want to be “sold” to. Instead, they want to have relationships with brands. This is why you will find many people sticking with the same brands for many years or even a lifetime. Think how much brand loyalty exists with Apple and Amazon.
It all starts with beginning a conversation with your potential customers who visit your website. You need to provide them with the information they can connect with. Tell them a compelling story. Great photography enables you to do just that!
Spotted Fox Digital Marketing — Building Brands with Purpose and Passion
At Spotted Fox Digital Marketing, we partner with businesses like yours to provide a full range of in-house digital marketing services. Spotted Fox Digital is a top-rated Tri-Cities Marketing Agency that believes in relationships, transparency, and trust! We are a results-driven top-ranked marketing company that uses responsive websites, targeted advertising, social media management, video, SEO, and more!
Our work is backed by data, providing your brand with the marketing insights needed to scale! Spotted Fox Digital marketing experts help businesses understand, reach & engage with their audiences through our digital marketing services.
If you are interested in scheduling a marketing consultation with us, we invite you to call Spotted Fox Digital at 509.792.3283 or complete our Online Contact Form.
