The Forgotten Billboard
Have you ever been driving down the highway and seen a billboard with a smiling mother and child advertising a health supplement, and then driven a little further only to see that same smiling mother and child now selling you a vacation?
No? You probably have, and just don’t remember.
Because of our jobs, we notice the same overused stock photos everywhere. So maybe your target customer can’t necessarily distinguish between a stock and custom photo. It could still be costing you.
Here’s Why
Remember that boring billboard? Of course, you don’t. That’s because it failed to elicit an emotional response, which makes it highly unlikely to stick in your head (and a waste of money). We’ve talked about how to create this emotional response before in regard to creating an empathetic brand, and the same goes for creating effective marketing tools using photography.
Your Message
If your brand is working for you, it should be focused on communicating your mission. It should be telling your ideal customers why you’re the best person to help solve their problems. (If not, write to us and we’ll help you get there.) Using a stock photo could confuse that solid messaging that you worked so hard to develop.
Stock photos are meant to be general enough to work in lots of places. That generality is the exact opposite of how you want to present yourself. You want to show potential customers why you’re different — why you’re the best person or business to solve their problem, and you’re not going to do that by using a photo that was created to be vague.
Authenticity
Instead of using vague stock photography to fill up space on your website, create on-brand, emotional, visual tools that can be leveraged on your social media, in ads, and more.
Consumers have high standards for content. Any content that you share or present to your audience should be valuable, otherwise, you’re just cluttering up their timelines, or worse— wasting their time. The way you add value is not by sharing the same generic stock photo as everyone else, it’s by creating something original.
When we do a photoshoot for clients, we come up with a detailed, strategic game plan. What story do these photos need to tell? What value are they adding to your business? We put in the time and effort to ensure that at the end of the shoot, you have a library of assets that aren’t just pretty, they’re influential.
