Choosing Images for your Website & Digital Marketing Campaigns
Choosing the right images for your website, print materials, and digital campaigns is crucial to their success. Images play an enormous roll in user engagement. Are your customers going to feel like they relate to the images on your website? Or are they going to want to hit the back button? Before you start the image selection process for your website there are a few things to consider.
1. What type of images do I want?
Do you want photos of humans, objects, buildings, landscapes, etc? Are you going to have images of your specific product or location, or use stock images? Answering these questions will help you refine your search and conceptualize ideas.
2. Understand Your Options for Legally Obtaining Imagery
It’s a common misconception that images your find on Google are fair game to use on print materials, in blog posts, etc, but this is NOT TRUE. To use an image in any of your marketing collateral you must own the copyright to the image. This occurs when you purchase the image from a stock photo library or legally obtain the image from a royalty free stock photo site.
3. Purchasing Paid Stock Photos
There are plenty of stock photo sites online. We recommend iStock as a great place to start your stock photo journey. They have a vast library searchable by keyword. If you can dream it, iStock has an image for it! (Trust me, I’ve looked up “Yoga Pose Business Meeting” and was NOT disappointed with the results.) Do note that images can be costly on iStock, ranging from $5-$35 an image, and that you should choose your selections wisely.
4. Using Royalty Free Stock Photos
There has been an insurgence of royalty free stock photo sites emerging online in recent years. These sites provide great images that are FREE to use, but aren’t going to provide the specific results of a paid stock photography site. Most royalty free stock photo sites are not searchable, so looking for the perfect image can be very time consuming. I recommend using these mostly as a source for finding blog images and not for choosing the images that will represent your brand in your key marketing materials.
Some of our favorite royalty free stock photo sites include Unsplash, PicJumbo & TheStocks.
5. Hiring a Professional Photographer
The best option for obtaining totally unique images for your brand is to hire a professional photographer. We recommend this for highlighting your unique products, services, locations, and team members. Mtn. Dog Media has a professional photographer on staff that will collaborate with our design team to capture the perfect collection of unique images. Check out his work on Elevation Rowing and MadWellness. When you work with a professional photographer you can capture the images that are 100% unique to your business to use across your marketing campaigns.
So now you’re ready to start brainstorming images for your website, print materials, or digital marketing campaign! You know which images you legally have the rights to use and which images you do not. When you’re ready to decide on your final images, let us know! We’ll share our words of wisdom and make sure you’re investing in the perfect photo solution for your business.