How to use photography to boost your brand in 2023
The human brain is built to process images rather than text.
So in 2023, boost your brand by selecting the right visuals, which can include a rebrand to revamp your logo, typography and colours, using illustrations to diversify your brand and dialling in your brand photography.
We could bore you with our thoughts on original vs stock photography or on stylised or studio vs documentary or natural photography but the truth is, there are a million blogs on those topics already!
Instead, we’re going to share 3 lesser-known strategies to use photography to boost your brand.
First, think about what else your target market is interested in, besides your product or service.
Because who said that all the photography you use needs to be of your product or service?
There are places photography can be used where you can flex your creative muscles, such as background images on your website, email banners and social media tiles.
Examples:
If your target customer loves the outdoors, use photos of mountains and forests as backgrounds on your website to pique their interest. If you are worried that the images are too distracting from your core offering, you can reduce the transparency for a more subtle effect.
If your target customer seeks a luxury lifestyle, frame your social media graphics with abstract photography of granite and marble backgrounds or even watercolour backgrounds in your brand colours. You could turn the photos black and white for a classic effect.
Second, consider your brand personality and how you could match your brand photography style to it.
An element of photography you can tailor to your brand is the style, which is how the photo has been edited. Some settings that can be customised to fit your brand personality include contrast, grain and colour saturation.
Photos with higher contrast are typically very striking because the colours are more intense with deeper blacks and brighter whites. This style suits strong, dynamic brands.
Photos with higher grain are, just that, more grainy, which can give them a more raw and unfiltered feel. Editing photos in this style would suit an organic, eco-friendly brand.
Maybe you’re a restaurant – you’ll typically want your food photos to be more saturated in colour to make your dishes pop. Or you’re a beauty brand or a children’s clothing label – you might favour more muted colours for a softer vibe.
Third, a 2014 study showed that Instagram photos with faces were 38% more likely to receive a ‘Like’.
So is your brand using enough photography that features faces? More specifically, does your brand photography feature you? After all, people don’t buy your product or service, they buy you.
It can be daunting to put your face on your website; however, there are ways you can do so that avoid having your noggin front and centre! You might feel more comfortable with a side profile photo or being partially hidden by some shadow or behind some foliage.
To feature more faces, you could rally up some friends and family who aren’t camera-shy and have them model for a set of original brand photos. Because they love and support you, they will likely appear more authentic on camera as well, rather than using stock photos which can come off cheesy and fake.
At Anema Designs, we’re passionate about using branding to build bold, successful and sticky businesses – and photography is just another tool we can use to do just that. While it’s fine and dandy to just pick photos that look cool, we hope these 3 strategies spark ideas of you and help you approach photography for your brand in a more thoughtful manner.
Stay classy!
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