Your brand identity goes beyond your website, either you are having your own website, blog or simply just need to enhance your brands identity one thing is very important in any strategy you are going to use in advertising your brand, visual contents. In recent times, photography has been in trend as one of the visual content tool used in building brand identity. If used in a proper way, it could change the popularity of your brand from barely known to one of the most popular in a very short time. This article teaches you how to utilize the power of photography to take your brand to the next level.
To understand better how photography can help in building your brand, let us observe two similar businesses and how they are making use of photography to build their individual brand; Zara and Ralph Lauren. Zara and Ralph Lauren are two different companies that sell the home extensions products. Point of focus on these two brands is how they portray their brands with photography; each photo tells a story about their products, what their brand is all about and what type of clients they are interested in. Ralph Lauren is all about luxury and sophistication while Zara Home is more about being affordable and cozy. It can be seen that the brands are different and they each use photography to communicate their messages to two different types of audience.
Visual contents can determine the success of a brand if used professionally, using the brands mentioned above as examples, both brands use different photographs of interiors but for a different purpose. This is exactly how to present your brand in order to attract desired clients by putting into consideration, the kind of people you want to attract and the message being communicated.
Explained below are few ideas on how you can use photography to build your brand, execute them in the order they appear:
- Start from concept to visualization
As for any great idea being used today, it started with a concept. To have a clear view of what branding concept is, you have to be able to answer three basic questions about your brand; message, concept, and objective. Having a clear view of these there three things will get you ready to go into the next stage, which is visualization.
In this age we are so lucky because some decades ago brands have to create physical vision boards but today we have tools like Pinterest, Deposiphotos and other similar tools to aid us in this task. Start gathering visual contents that inspire the concept of your brand from online magazines, photographs websites etc. and use them to create your motherboard as envisioned by you. Endeavour to gather a coherent group of visuals i.e. that communicate likely messages.
- Curate your collection
Once you have the photographs in a single place, look through the collection and start sorting patterns, if necessary take more time in filtering your selection of photographs. This may seem like the most difficult part but it is very important in helping you to zoom in on the image that is going to represent your brand. The proper way to go into this stage is to take a look at things from your audience perspectives; if you are one of the audience, would you be attracted to this brand? Would you be interested in its products? Take the answers to these questions seriously because you are actually choosing these photographs to please your audience.
- More Filtering
Apart from the concept of your brand in selecting visual content photographs, there are other things to put into consideration such as colors, style, quality and even the visuals of your competitors. Consider the colors that are currently trending in your brands niche, lightning, composition, and vibes, if your photographs are ever going to contain people displaying emotions, make sure their emotions are real.
- The style of photography matters
There different types of photography namely; retro, classic, minimalist, classic, material and handcrafted. Familiarize yourself with this types of photography and identify with type is suitable for your brand. To make things easier, some stock photographer of agencies have a series of photographs with the same scenery to choose from.
- The main point is to tell a story
Dont just choose any photo to add to your visual contents, every image in the design should be able to tell a story of at least two sentences. Opt for images that will help you tell your story in a narrative manner, the images that will enhance the meaning of your texts.
- Quality and Creativity are also important
While making use of all the previous ideas make sure not to be distracted from the quality of the contents, a grainy or blur photograph will neither make any impression nor communicate any message. Make sure your chosen photographs are in high definition, and the subject image is in focus. Colors should be appealing and in harmony. Make sure there is no distracting element in the picture.
Lastly, be creative, dont just hung up on to technicalities, perform more experiments with more photographs using the above ideas, and always make sure to keep quality and consistency in mind.
Other basic tips in selecting suitable photographs include; choosing photographs that can communicate even without adding any word on it, bury your ego and learn from successful competitors, try to make the first impression because the first impression lasts longer.
If you ever got stuck on where to find a lot of high quality, professional and relevant images for your projects, Depositphotos is a good place to start. There you have the privilege to download any image for just $1, you can also create albums to organize your images.