3 Ways to Use Images to Elevate Your Business

By Guest Author | BRANDING | September 7, 2020

In the current image-obsessed world, a picture is perhaps worth more than a thousand words. It’s probably worth hundreds of thousands of shares, retweets, and likes. As a business leader, you need to come up with ways to leverage images to enhance your brand visually.

By CHRISTIAN KRUSE

Although pictures are a fundamental part of developing a successful brand, choosing the right ones can prove to be a herculean task. Every detail is extremely important, including the colour, the type of framing, and the quality of content. If you’re looking to build a digital personality, nurture a unique brand identity, and send compelling messages to your target audience, here are three ways to use pictures to elevate your business.

1.     Choose Images that Resonates with Your Message, Brand, and Target Audience

People can now take and consume pictures and videos in a variety of ways, thanks to mobile devices. Consumers are consistently looking for multimedia content, from an Instagram post to a Facebook update to a collection of photos on a website. These images can elevate your brand, but you must choose them wisely.

The first step is to ensure the image suits your brand’s identity and message and resonates with your audience. Prioritize the needs and preferences of your audience. Examine the demographic information so you can choose a picture that suits your audience’s age, education level, income range, and likes. But remember there may be photos that fit into what your audience likes but don’t resonate with your brand. Integrate relevance into your selection process. That way, you’ll choose images that align with your main offerings.

Be creative and experiment as much as you can while keeping the message as clear as possible. Your target audience should not only enjoy the image you use on your site but they should also connect with your brand in a meaningful way. You can achieve that by ensuring there’s seamless assimilation of images together with a compelling message into your brand.

2.     Leverage the Power of Social Media

In this digital era, social media is indispensable for businesses whether large or small. It influences how today’s consumer finds new businesses, performs research, makes buying decisions, builds up loyalty, and interacts with businesses. But that doesn’t mean you need to be on every social media network out there. Instead, it means you need to have a systemized social media plan that’s tailored to help you accomplish your goals.

To get started, choose social media platforms that suit your target demographic. For instance, Snapchat’s users tend to be relatively younger than those of Instagram or Twitter. So if you’re targeting a younger demographic, Snapchat will do the trick. You can make use of the channel’s Stories feature to generate story-driven and interactive visual content. 

Every channel has its own special culture and standards. You must follow these standards to appear professional and relevant. Content that performed impressively on Snapchat may underperform on Facebook. While it’s imperative to keep track of visual trends, it’s equally important to create unique content that’ll differentiate your brand from the crowd.  One practical strategy is to develop a gallery of unique images and content that you can share regularly on your preferred social media platform to build a digital identity for your brand.

Pro Tip: Incorporate your brand colors into your office space. Have a siding installation that matches with your brand colors done by a licensed siding contractor. That way, you’ll build a space that truly maintains a consistent style.

3.     Make Your Images Unforgettable

The Internet has millions of images competing for people’s attention. Consumers don’t waste their time on dull and poor-quality images. So whether you’re using beautiful colors or a hilarious quote overlaying a picture, your multimedia must be attention-grabbing and memorable.

Use vibrant images with noticeable colors that imply excitement. There’s definitely room for being creative and playful, but don’t get carried away and end up annoying your target audience. The idea is to encourage insightful conversations, not to spread negative energy.

Adhere to copyright rules and regulations by using pictures that are legally downloaded from a reliable source. Besides the costs, using unlicensed images can have a massive negative impact on your brand.

Key Takeaways

Relevancy and consistency are an important part of using images to promote your business. Besides aligning with your target audience’s interests, the photos you add to your site must relate in a certain way to your products and services. The relation could be literal or symbolic. Regularly sharing visually consistent images on every social media channel you’re active in can help you establish lifelong brand recognition with your target audience.