Humans are visual creatures. Research shows that 90% of all information transmitted to the brain is visual and that the brain can identify images in as little as 13 milliseconds. In this über-digital day and age, we are constantly bombarded with visual stimuli from the moment we wake up to the moment we put our phones away and head to bed for the evening. So how do successful brands stand out against all that visual noise?
Professional brand photography may be the boost your business needs to get ahead. From social media posts to website design, strong visuals — especially recent, high-quality lifestyle photography of the real people, places, and things that make your brand unique — instantly capture the attention of your prospective customers, helping you to focus their interest against the backdrop of web-based white noise.
Tell Your Story With Brand Photography
It’s a cliché because it’s true: A picture is worth a thousand words. Brand photography can express ideas, showcase people and products, and inspire emotional reactions and connections in ways that words alone can’t. Quality visuals can help tell your organization’s story authentically, conveying your core brand messaging in a manner that connects with your audiences in a meaningful way.
Consider your brand’s voice, tone, and overall aesthetics: What photography styles and images would seamlessly integrate with your branding and story? A modern tech-savvy SaaS brand might opt for commercial photography that features bright, highly saturated photos. A business selling products online may choose e-commerce product photography against a clean, crisp white background to showcase their products, while a family-owned organic pet food company might choose warm-toned, intimate lifestyle photography or portraits of their staff interacting with their own pets or harvesting farm-fresh ingredients by hand.
By identifying visual content that aligns with your brand’s narrative, values, and personality, you can enhance and crystallize your overall messaging, helping you reach your audience faster and more effectively. This authenticity will be appreciated by your customers, who
want to see brand photography with the real people, products, and services behind the businesses they love (or want to love.) Top-tier, up-to-date photography can help you build trust and establish meaningful relationships with your audience in just a few shutter snaps.
Branding and Lifestyle Photography Can Improve Your Metrics
Let’s be honest: People do judge a book by its cover. The average person is distracted in as little as 8 seconds, and readers of novels and websites alike are turned off by low-quality photos, badly composed images, and other hallmarks of less-than-professional visual branding that can be counterproductive. Alternatively, by investing in professional lifestyle photography, you are communicating to your audience that your brand is a worthwhile partner, takes pride in its image and products, and is committed to delivering quality in everything it does. For most (if not virtually all) brands, these high-quality, professional visuals help hold a user’s interest for longer, resulting in more leads and better conversion rates overall.
Your audience wants to see quality, authentic visual representations of your brand, from the products you sell to the people you employ. We know that articles containing images — any images — receive
94% more views compared to those that have none, and that users who click on photos of
real people are 200% more likely to convert to a sale. Now imagine the impact if those visuals were top quality, well-composed, and perfectly incorporated into the webpage’s design!
When you invest in professional branding and commercial photography for your brand’s web presence and digital content, you’re also investing in your metrics. Well-crafted visuals can improve your performance across criteria: Site traffic,
search visibility, engagement rates, social media following, and beyond. By posting photo and video content consistently and incorporating dynamic, visually appealing images into your web presence, your brand can begin to build a following, generate leads that convert into sales, and foster brand recognition and loyalty among your customers.
Create Consistent Content With the Help of a Commercial Photography Library
Quality brand photography can make content planning and creation infinitely easier for businesses and their marketing teams. By building a library of professional-grade images and videos, brands can streamline their content creation process and focus on producing meaningful, high-performing content on a consistent posting schedule — instead of bogging down the process with impromptu smartphone photoshoots and amateur image editing.
Furthermore, by investing in professional marketing photography, you can effectively “future-proof” your brand, providing evergreen images that can be used for years to come. Using a set of high-quality, stylistically consistent images to represent your brand and your products, your visuals are more likely to remain relevant and on-trend for years to come, which can help you stay ahead of the competition and attract new customers to your business.
Speaking of
consistency: Our brains are built to identify patterns. Deep in the most primal parts of all that gray matter, patterns equal safety — predicting possible and probable outcomes helped us survive in our species’ infancy, after all. That’s why brands with
clear, consistent visual identities tend to thrive: They’re viewed as trustworthy and professional, while brands with disorganized, inconsistent visual language are perceived as unreliable and unprofessional.
Commercial photography can help immensely in creating
strong, cohesive visual branding. A professional commercial photographer will understand how to translate your brand’s identity into visuals, including elements like a consistent color palette and image composition.
Unlike the average marketing intern armed with little more than an iPhone and their wits, your hired photographer will come prepared with the expertise and equipment to capture commercial images in a wide range of settings and lighting conditions. Whether you need product shots, lifestyle, and environmental images, or simple staff portraits, a professional photographer will have the flexibility and know-how to meet your needs while establishing or reinforcing your brand’s visual identity.
You can (and should!) show your photographer examples of other brands’ photography that contains elements you’d like to emulate in your own visual brand. Articulate to the best of your ability what you like about each example image and how it relates to the brand you are trying to build. With a little collaboration and communication, you’ll be well on your way to creating that oh-so-aspirational Instagram grid you’ve always wanted for your brand.
Oh, Snap! Need Brand Photography? Dayta’s Got You.
If you're looking to invest in professional brand photography for your business, your Dayta Pod can help plan, book, and organize a photo and/or video shoot from start to finish. Get rolling on commercial photography to make sure your organization has quality images that support your marketing tactics. Reach out to your Pod or contact us to learn more about how we can help you level up your brand’s visual language!
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