In a visually driven world, you know you need to have images to help promote your brand, tell your story and share your values. But having bad photography could be losing you business.
In 2015, Eviivo, a booking management app for British B&Bs, had independent research carried out on how photography impacted bookings. Bad photographs are putting 82% of the British public off booking B&Bs. Financially, that equates to £8.9million of business lost every single year.
“82% Britains were put off a property purely because of the photographs”
“The terrible pictures that lose Britain’s B&Bs £8.9million every year”. Daily Mail.
What is bad photography? And why does it matter?
Bad photography is images that are:
- Generally poor quality
- Don’t represent your brand
- Do a poor job of telling your story
- Don’t reflect your values.
And knowing you have this problem can be frustrating. Worse, we might get judged by our audience on today’s marketing platforms for using poor images.
What you could lose
But what can good photography do?
A Copenhagen-based creative agency, Uncle Grey, enlisted social media influences to take 327,000 high quality images of small businesses in Scandinavia. This was part of a project for Canon cameras. They were asked to post these images on Google’s Local Guides platform. The effort resulted in an increase in sales for nearly half of those businesses, and Google changed its algorithm to favour higher-quality images.
Bad photography could be losing you business, but getting good images can help. So here are some top tips of what you can do to change it.
Top 10 tips on how to improve your brand photography.
- Review your photographs together in one view. If you don’t have images that work together in one grid space, the chances are consistency is one of your key problems. Look to creating images that have a similar feel.
- Study the quality of your images. If you can see that they aren’t up to scratch, why not check out one of the many online courses available if you want to maintain control, or invest the time and money in getting a professional photographer.
- Make sure you have a good, uncluttered background in your images.
- Make sure that you have good quality light when taking images. If it’s poor light, make sure your photographer knows the best way in which to work with it.
- Define brand guidelines for your images. Do they need to be story-based or more functional? Will they need to have a certain style, or editing style? Do they need to run along a theme?
- Spend time learning what kind of images your customers engage most with.
- Avoid stock images which say nothing about you or your brand, and which often aren’t consistent with your other images.
- Check the people in your images. If you’ve used models, are they the right models? Can your audience relate to them?
- Always prepare a brief to photographers and go through it with them to make sure you don’t waste your time getting images that don’t reflect your story or values.
- So you don’t lose quality, make sure your images are edited with the platform in mind.
I believe everyone deserves to have photography that is unique to them and their story.
If you would like me to carry out an audit on your brand’s photography, I will provide you with the top 5 areas where you can improve your images fast.