Every time I look at my phone or laptop, an endless wave of curated images fills my feed.  Often I’ve wondered, ” Is it still worth it to try to market online in 2024? It just seems like it’s all a bunch of noise”.

As we go through our day-to-day lives of work, school, home and kids, we sneak little peaks at our phone to chip away at our inbox, catch up with the news or simply have a chuckle at the latest memes. However, chances are that you don’t even remember 15% of what you saw on your phone yesterday. the landscape is so saturated that very little seems to stick in our brains. This seems pretty bleak from a marketing standpoint but there is one solution that will work if you stay the course long enough.

As Dr. Seuss once said, “today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive that is you-er than you.” By being a genuine brand and using honest imagery, you can connect with your target market on a much deeper level than using stock photos or “borrowing” photos from the web. 

Some Statistics About Brand Photography

• People remember only 10% of information three days after hearing it, on average; adding a picture can improve recall to 65%
• Nearly two-thirds of people say they’re visual learners
• Consumers are significantly more likely to think favorably of ads that emphasize photography, over ads that emphasize text
• Marketers rank images as the most important content type, ahead of text and video
• 68% of marketers say they plan to use images more in the future

Statistics data from MGD Solutions

So, Just Shoot a Bunch of Photos on my iPhone Then?

Yes and No. Your instagram feed doesn’t need to be curated to the max, and shooting quick shots in the moment is better than no images at all. However, for printed marketing and website purposes, it makes a ton of sense to hire a photographer to create a library for your marketing team to pull from. You’d be surprised how much of a time saver it can be to put together flyers and quick online posts when your team isn’t scrounging for content. Even photos that aren’t super dynamic can make great photos for posts. Remember that you’ll need room for white space to add text. 

Let’s look at these two example photos I shot for my friends at Vital Link. Nothing really special about them on the surface. Students working on a project together and a photo of a student listening to a lecture. But in the right hands, this is a great image that can support multiple types of messaging for their brand.

They tell their own mini story. One says, “listen up, other people are paying attention” and the other says “we get to work, join us.” Never mind that the other kids in the photo have less than ideals facial expressions or masks, they will just get covered up anyways.

By augmenting these photos with appropriate text, you can build a stronger brand awareness and get your message out without breaking a sweat. Just pull a photo from the library and go. Heck, you can pull from the same library of photos for years. 

I did some work for the Anaheim YMCA back in 2018. They hired me to take some photos of their summer camp, swim, ballet and soccer programs. Fast forward to today, and I still see my images in their marketing emails and even the city of Anaheim Summer Program catalog. The ROI they received by hiring someone to take excellent photos of their equally excellent programs was huge. Imagine your marketing team having images like these to pull from that show your actual customers / clients for your social media posts.

If you’re interested in hiring me to take some brand images for your business or non-profit, please shoot me a message and get the conversation going. I love supporting my local community in greater Anaheim and would love to build a library of images for your brand.

daniel@danielmezaphotography.com