Visual content is one of the most immediately impactful ways to grab your audience’s attention. High-quality images help your brand communicate with consumers in an intuitive, natural way, catering to their need for visual stimuli and transgressing language barriers.
But there’s no denying that producing your own images and videos can be an expensive route if you are a budding business or have a limited marketing budget.
That’s where stock photos come in.
Stock photos are simply photos that professional photographers and agencies around the world have created and uploaded onto accessible websites for brands to download, purchase, and use as needed to enhance their marketing efforts.
But in what ways can they be used to promote your brand, and what are the best practices to keep in mind when using them?
Today, we’re going to answer all of these questions and more.
Best Practices When Using Stock Photos For Branding
Using stock photos requires a slightly different approach to producing your own brand-specific content. Stock photos aren’t custom-created for your brand, so they need to be utilized in a way that still feels as unique as possible. Here are some best practices for achieving that:
- Avoid obvious cliches. Try to steer clear of stock images that look overly generic or cliche so that your brand’s credibility remains strong.
- Know the crowd you’re appealing to. The type of consumer you are trying to attract should determine what kind of stock photos you use. Aim for stock content that reflects the lifestyle, aspirations, and trends that your target audience appreciates most.
- Customize where you can. You don’t need to use stock photos exactly as they come. In fact, we recommend that you don’t. Once you’ve obtained or purchased a stock image, feel free to edit, crop, and restyle it for a more unique and brand-specific look.
- Be consistent. Stock photos are as varied as they come. If you don’t actively search for photos that look consistently similar or fit into the same aesthetic, it may be difficult to convey their authenticity to consumers. Maintain a consistent brand image.
- Source images from leading sites. Not all stock image sites feature great-quality photos, and some are overrun with marketing, making it hard to find what you’re looking for. When looking for great stock photos for branding, always stick to reputable sites like Pexels, Unsplash, Adobe Stock, and Freepik.
5 Ways To Use Stock Photos To Boost Your Branding Efforts
There are plenty of different ways to use stock photos when coming up with a visually engaging content marketing plan. These images offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing when, where, and which ones you’d like to use to represent your brand in an appealing way.
Below, we’ll take you through five of the most popular and effective ways to use stock photos in your branding efforts—online and offline options included.
Blogs and Websites
Whether you have a WordPress site or use a website builder to create an online portfolio, you should have a blog. Blogs play an integral role in your marketing efforts, and they’re the perfect place to add stock photos that align with your brand. Whenever you want to enhance a blog, add a background to some text, or simply fill up white space, a stock photo (or two or three) can be the solution.
Visual information, such as that introduced by a stock image, is one of the most powerful ways to get consumers to stop what they’re doing and pay closer attention to your site. In fact, studies suggest that blog content featuring images is up to 80% more memorable than pure text. This makes stock photos the perfect option for augmenting the memorability and emotional impact of the blog and website content you upload.
These images also boost your website’s SEO if you include alt text. Alt text gives search engines like Google more contextual information about a page’s content, which can increase your site’s rankings.
Social Media Content
Another highly popular way to use stock photos is to add them to your social media content. By now, we all know how crucial a strong online presence is on social media, but producing your own visual content for it every time can be pricey and overwhelming.
But there’s no need to produce your own images when a stock photo will get the job done. You can use stock photos for posts on your main feed, on stories, reels, and even display photos.
Print Materials
Stock photos aren’t exclusively useful in the digital world. They also provide prime options for physical print materials such as flyers, pamphlets, and posters. You might not think that physical print-outs are as popular in the 2020s, but plenty of businesses credit them for their success, even now in the contemporary age of marketing.
For instance, printed materials convey authenticity and credibility to consumers—two things that are highly valued in today’s competitive marketplace. You can use stock images to enhance the visual appeal of your print-outs and make them more engaging for the general public.
Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are another incredibly effective way to reach your target market and utilize stock images as marketing tools. You can use stock photos here to embellish newsletters and make them more engaging for recipients to enjoy.
The more engaging your newsletters are, the more likely you are to attract website traffic and generate more sales and subscriptions online.
Slideshows and Presentations
Marketing doesn’t end with your public online presence. When it comes to collaborating with other brands and appealing to investors, you still want to put your best foot forward and showcase the visual side of your brand in a cohesive and professional way.
Stock photos can be instrumental in creating PowerPoint slides, infographics, and other forms of visual presentation that help package your brand seamlessly and enable you to share your brand’s vision with the world.
Elevating Your Branding One Photo at a Time
Stock photos are a great visual content solution for brands that don’t have the resources to produce their own content but still want to showcase their brand identity and build brand awareness as best they can. By carefully selecting stock photographs that suit your brand identity, you can add visual interest to your marketing material without going over budget.
