By incorporating images throughout your website, you are offering information to your viewer before they even have to read the content on your page. It is common practice for a business to put stock images on their website, but there is a fine line between accurate representation and sending a cheesy vibe due to the images you chose. Before we give you helpful tips to follow while choosing stock images, check out three eye-opening statistics.
Recently, Hubspot put together visual content marketing statistics that emphasize the importance of the images you choose across all platforms relating to your company, including your website:
- “32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second (27%).”
- “When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.”
- “11% more B2C marketers than B2B marketers say visual content is the most important type of content today.”
These statistics further cement the importance of using images across all company platforms – social media, website, eNewsletter, print materials, and more. We’ve put together helpful tips to aid you while choosing stock images for your print or digital platforms:
1. Search for High-Quality Colors
When you search for stock images for your website, make sure the images have high-quality colors. Avoid images with high contrast or high saturation, as that lowers the quality of the image. Additionally, you can create consistency across the entire website by choosing images that showcase your brand’s colors. This will tie every page together in your website, adding to the flow and ebb of your site.
2. Choose Candid Versus Posed
You want your customers to relate to your brand, and images can help accomplish that by adding a human element to it. However, these images must be chosen carefully! While choosing your images, select the ones that look candid versus posed (consider elements such as expression, lighting, body stance). This increases your brand’s relatability.
For certain industries where the company is person-centric versus product- or service-centric, it may be smart to use real photos of your team. If this is not possible, choose an image that shows a person’s back instead of front-facing.
3. Convey the Desired Emotion
Images can elicit an emotion for the viewer. Before choosing an image for your website, determine what emotion you want from the viewer when he sees this image. For industries that deal with life’s more frustrating issues like allergies or sick children, you could choose images that portray what it’s like once they’ve received treatment.
For example, choose an image of a peaceful woman enjoying the outdoors because her allergies have been treated versus an image of an unhappy woman blowing her nose because she is still suffering from allergies.
4. Be Mindful of the Surrounding Environment
You don’t want to be misleading with your pictures, so it’s important to show an accurate environment. You can accomplish this by choosing zoomed in shots that capture a smaller viewpoint. This puts the focus on the product or person that is in the image instead of the surrounding environment.
5. Opt for Minimalism & Clean Aesthetics
Our culture right now enjoys minimal and clean aesthetics. You can achieve this by choosing pictures that are not cluttered, outdated, or have font in the images. Choosing an image that is simple versus busy will keep the reader engaged in the content instead of feeling overwhelmed by all the information on the page.
Partner with M&R Marketing
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with choosing the right images for your website (or any other company platform), you’re not the only one. According to the Hubspot article referenced above, “Design and visual content is the biggest challenge for 23.7% of content marketers.” Our team of marketing experts can help!
Choosing the right images is only one in a thousand decisions you need to make for your website. If you’re searching for a company that can take this important task off your plate, partner with us! This is what we do every day, and we’re passionate about it. Our entire team of marketeers are here to help your company thrive! Give us a call with your questions: 478-621-4491.