A Marketer's Perspective: 3 Tips for Choosing the Best Images

So, you’ve found some great photo sites, and you want to use them in your marketing materials. Awesome! But before you download those images, read these tips for choosing the right image from a marketing perspective:

1. Consider How the Image Will Be Used

Let’s say that you’re creating a poster advertising an event. You might want to think about whether your poster will be displayed horizontally or vertically. If you choose a horizontal stock photo, but your poster layout is vertical, you might have a problem.

One of the key factors in choosing an image is knowing how it will be used. If the image is part of a larger campaign, you’ll want to think about the image’s versatility throughout a variety of mediums. Will your photo be used on the web, in calls to action (CTAs), in emails, or printed in brochures and posters? Will the image look good when it is cropped to fit the dimensions of different social media platforms?

Photo credit: StockLayouts

2. Remember Your Buyer Persona and the Buyer’s Journey

As marketers, don’t forget about the buyer personas that you want to target and how these personas fit into the buyer’s journey. Will your image be one that will resonates with your persona? If your target audience is millennials, you want your persona to instantly relate to the ad, so you may not want to choose an image featuring people in an older generation.

What stage of the buyer’s journey is your persona currently in, and how would this image speak to them? If you’re a company that’s advertising your newest product, you probably wouldn’t want to use the same image to advertise to people who have never heard of your product before.

3. Choose a Memorable Photo

Content that evokes an emotional response will leave a lasting impact. Why? Getty Images found that emotional pictures and content resonate with your audience because they are viewed as more authentic! In fact, Harvard Business Review found that images and content that cause a reader to feel emotions are most likely the ones that go viral. Will people remember your photo?

Here are some examples of memorable photos that effectively play to people's emotions:

Photo credit: France ADOT

Photo credit: Juvenile Protective Association

Keep these three tips in mind when considering pictures to ensure that you’re choosing an image that will enhance your marketing efforts. Stay tuned for the next blog in this series, in which we’ll offer some tips for choosing the right images from a graphic design perspective. If you have any questions, or if you want to share your favorite examples of memorable marketing images, please feel free to leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!