Choosing Images for Your Website and Marketing
Images are great for making a good first impression. But how do you ensure you’re choosing the right images for your website and marketing?
Images are an important part of your website and digital marketing so choose carefully! Your audience will likely look at the images you choose before reading any of the text. If you want to make a good first impression, you need high-quality images that fit in with your company branding and set you apart from your competitors. Here are some tips to help keep you on track.
Using your images.
Using your images will add more authenticity to your website and allow customers to learn more about your organisation before they interact with you. Where possible, photos showing examples of your work are an excellent way to showcase your business. This depends on the industry you are in! You could also add pictures of yourself, the team, your premises and action shots of your team at work. This will help to tell the story of your business to potential customers. Make sure you use high-resolution images and that these are cropped and edited if needed. If you don’t feel confident editing images, see if your web designer can help. As you own the rights to these images, consider adding watermarks to help protect your work.
Using stock images.
Stock images are another great addition to your website. When you first start, you may not have many of your own images, therefore stock images offer the perfect alternative. They are also used by established businesses for advertising banners, services, promotions and blogs. There are millions of stock images to choose from a variety of both free and paid sites. Whilst the free sites are more financially appealing, remember the images are likely to be lower quality and more heavily used across other websites. Take your time to select images that match your brand and convey the message you want to get across. Here are some stock image websites to get you started.
Free stock images.
This is a great place to start as you may be able to find what you need without spending money! That said, we would never advise compromising your marketing just to save a few pounds. Delivering the right message to customers should always be your priority. Here are some good sites to get you started.
Unsplash:
Pexels:
Pixabay:
Stockvault:
Rawpixel:
Paid stock image websites.
With paid sites, you typically have the option to buy one image at a set price, by credits to allow you to buy multiple images or take out a subscription to download some images each month. Each site works slightly differently so have a look at all of them before committing. If you work out how many images you are likely to need in advance, you can choose the most cost-effective option.
iStock:
Shutterstock:
Dreamstime:
Adobe Stock Images:
123rf:
Image copyright.
Taking images from Google or other search engines and websites could land you in hot water. You should assume that all images you find online are protected by copyright unless you know otherwise. That means that you do not have the right to use it on your website, post it on social media, or use for other purposes without seeking the permission of the copyright holder. In the last year, there has been a rise in lawsuits for this kind of copyright infringement. You can expect this to continue as new technology makes it easier to detect such cases. In summary, this is a complicated legal issue and to keep life simple, we would advise only using your own images or those that you have legitimately downloaded from stock photo agencies.
A fresh approach to image marketing.
As we said at the start, having well thought out images for your website, social media and other marketing can make a huge difference to audience engagement. We hope the sites and advice above will prove useful to you in planning your next campaign. At FreshOnline we work closely with our clients to advise on best practice for all website and marketing projects.
