Having professional looking product photos will make your products and your business appear more attractive and dependable. Tripods and smartphone cameras can give you great results. EBay has even found a 5% increase in sales with better quality product photos.
I have become a habitual Instagrammer.
Quality photos + useful product copy = increased sales and fewer returns Your return on your investment in high quality product photos is maximized when complimented by highly useful and unique product copy. The closer a customer gets to making a purchase decision, the more information they want about a product. Especially at higher price points. Providing multiple photos of a product is a great way to improve a customer’s shopping experience and potentially increase your online sales. Providing multiple product photos helps people visualise the product and is will help you incHelp your potential customer visualise the product by taking multiple photos.
When I am out cycling, walking or just sitting admiring the view or the passing parade, I am looking for photo oportunities that I can snap and then share on my Instagram “app”.
Increase Sales With Better Product Photoshop
All I need to be carrying is my iPhone or iPad and with my Instagram app waiting patiently for me, I can capture that photo, apply a snazzy filter and click the Facebook and the Twitter share buttons and it flies around the world.
It then showcases in my follower’s streams and updates and invites them to engage with me by commenting, liking or sharing.
Jamie Oliver a “celebrity chef”, understands this and with over 412,000 followers on Instagram has embraced the power of photos to market the Jamie Oliver brand.
Not surprisingly, the better the photo the more it drives engagement and Instagram takes my ordinary and average photos and gives them that “zing” factor (a good example is my Instagram photo from Istanbul, Turkey in the top right corner of this post) .
Increase Sales With Better Product Photos Without
If you are in need of professionally-designed graphics on a regular basis, check out Penji. For a flat monthly fee, you get unlimited print, digital, ads, and UX/UI designs. The JEFFBULLAS15 promo code will give you 15% off your first month.
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The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Business
The Age of Visual Culture
We live in the age of the “camera in everyone’s pocket” and with more than 2.5 billion camera phones in use we are entering a new dynamic era around image creation and content according to Bob Lisbon from Luminate.
This can be broken into three phases as we enter the age of visual culture and language.
Phase One: Massive increase in photo creation
Ten percent of photos taken by humankind took place in the last 12 months
Phase Two: The Rise of Image Centric Social Networks
Photos are becoming the “universal language”. The fastest growing social media networks are not surprisingly Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.
These social networks are the names on everyone’s lips as they have embraced the visual medium and have made it easy to upload and share images and photos online.
Phase Three: Images become Interactive
Pinterest is one of the first platforms that allows you to interact with static images and Luminate’s image apps (which are used by more than 100 million consumers) is also an example.
So how and why should you use images in your business communications, marketing and social networks?
6 Reasons Why Images are Important
If you have an online store, issue press releases or even just have a Facebook business “page”, then here are 6 reasons to publish images and photos as part of your business marketing tactics.
If you are in need of professionally-designed graphics on a regular basis, check out Penji. For a flat monthly fee, you get unlimited print, digital, ads, and UX/UI designs. The JEFFBULLAS15 promo code will give you 15% off your first month.
- Articles with images get 94% more total views
- Including a Photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45%
- 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in local search results
- In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product
- In an online store, customers think that the quality of a products image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%)
- Engagement rate on Facebook for photos averages 0.37% where text only is 0.27% (this translates to a 37% higher level of engagement for photos over text)
Infographic by MDG Advertising
Takeaways:
So how can you adapt to the age of “Visual Culture” as a business?
1. If you have an online store you need to include high definition images to drive higher engagement and sales
2. If your business issues press releases then include images with your article
3. If you use Facebook as an important part of your social media marketing strategy then you need to include photos in your updates and not just text and links
What About You
How are you using images and photos with your business? Has it worked for you.
What could you do better?
I look forward to hearing your stories.
If you are in need of professionally-designed graphics on a regular basis, check out Penji. For a flat monthly fee, you get unlimited print, digital, ads, and UX/UI designs. The JEFFBULLAS15 promo code will give you 15% off your first month.
More Reading
- 6 Social Media Networks to Watch in 2012 – Plus Infographics
Infographic by MDG Advertising
Running an
#1. Make Images Appealing
Have you ever been tempted to use stock photos on your product pages? If you have, do not give into that temptation. The images on your product pages should be extremely appealing in order to drive sales. This means that they should be of the actual product, high-quality, and beautiful to look at. Invest in these photos. Hire a photographer to (literally) put your products in the best light. If your customers don’t enjoy looking at your product photos, it’s very unlikely that they will want to buy them. Simple as that.
#2. Show the Products in Action
Whether you’re selling dresses or dishpans, customers want to see these items in action, being used for their intended purpose. Help their imagination along by staging some photos in use, along with the main photo of the item on its own. Your customers want to be able to imagine using the product, which is a lot easier if you show them what that looks like.
#3. Play Up Unique Features
What distinguishes your product from others on the market? What makes it stand out, and what is your unique selling proposition? Whatever it is, be sure to play that uniqueness up in your photos whenever possible. Apple did this very successfully with early product photos of the MacBook Air. A laptop that thin hadn’t been manufactured before, and Apple highlighted its small size by displaying a photo of the product being pulled out of an ordinary envelope. This made an impression by showing off the small size of the laptop—the feature that made the Air so unique.
#4. Downsize Files
Speed is so important to the average e-commerce customer that any delay in loading pages can represent huge losses in revenue. It’s estimated that a 1 second delay in page loading costs the e-commerce behemoth Amazon approximately $1.6 billion in revenue. Your losses won’t be anything close to that, of course, but loading times do affect your conversion rates. For this reason, it’s best to try to keep your file sizes as small as possible. Customers have different connection speeds, and keeping your photos in a modest JPEG format will help keep your site speedy. Just make sure the quality stays high!
#5. Add Some People
Adding real people to your product images accomplishes two things: it helps people envision using the product, and it makes people more likely to convert. If you sell clothing, for example, it’s much more appealing to see a dress modeled on a real person, rather than a dressmaker’s model. Even if the person looks very different from the buyer, it gives them an idea of how the item might look when it’s being worn, and not just how it looks floating in space. Adding people helps to add context to the photos, allowing buyers to get a better idea of how the product functions.
#6. Offer Several Image Sizes & Photos
It’s a bit of a pain to come up with a photo series for each item, showing products from different angles and in different contexts, but it’s well worth the effort. People want to feel like they’re picking up the item and getting to know it before they buy. Let them see products from all angles, and let them resize!
#7. Optimize for Mobile
We’re connected all the time, by more devices each year. In 2017, the average household is expected to have 17 connected devices, many of which will be mobile gadgets. If your product images look good on a desktop, but not a smartphone, it’s time to do some optimization. So many people research and buy on mobile devices these days that you can’t afford to overlook this opportunity.
#8. Make Sure Thumbnails Show Up in Search Results
What grabs your attention when you’re searching for a product? A link and a line of text, or a photo? If you’re like most people, then you’re more likely to click on the thumbnails you find in search results. For an e-commerce site, this presents an opportunity to grab customers’ attention immediately, hopefully converting them before they move on to other options. How do you do this? List your products at Google Merchant Center right away.
#9. Add Social Share Buttons
You probably have your social share buttons (links to your social media profiles) on your home page, but how about your product pages? Adding share buttons to your products will allow visitors to share your product images on sites like Facebook and Pinterest, increasing traffic and reach. Adding these share buttons has another purpose as well—search engine indexing favors pages with these social signals. You can even set up each image to be easily pinned or shared, and don’t forget to prompt your customers to share after they make a purchase!
#10. Set up Alt Tags
Alt tags are descriptions of your photos that will show up if a photo fails to load for any reason. They provide an alternative information source to the photo, and they also help with search engine indexing. Every product image you have should have an alt tag, and the tag should be as specific as possible. It’s also best to make sure the tag is at least 125 characters long for search engine purposes. Do not skip this step, it’s very important when you optimize product images!