With more and more consumers using the internet to search for local businesses, it’s safe to say that the world has surpassed the digital age and is now evolving into the content era. Consumers are spending hours searching for brands online. Thus, this is a strong indicator that your presence and reputation online it exponentially crucial today more than ever.
Build trust using styled stock photos and give your audience a great first impression, show off a little. Your online images are the first thing they will see, so pick them to be inviting and enticing to click. Here is a styled stock photography tutorial to give you a hand.
Great styled stock photos carry with them your message. They give your audience a sense of your business and make up your entire brand.
A research found that 67% of online shoppers rated high-quality images as being “very important” in their buying decision as compared to other factors such as product information. It’s therefore clearer that the images you use in your online branding are the first influence you have over your target audience.
What Is a Stock Photo?
A stock photo is a professionally shot photo, made available for license through a fee payment to both the photographer and the stock agency managing the photos. While acquiring a legal right to use the images, the photographer retains the copyright of his work.
Styled stock photos specialize in various industries and are today less stocky and more real because consumers have developed a keen eye in noticing real images from regular stocks.
Styled stock images are a great resource for your online branding needs because they’re now very professional, readily available and are low cost as compared to shooting your own photos. That will require lots of money to either invest in photography equipment or hiring a photographer. Plus, the time to organize for various shoots that may involve models. All this translates in costs in terms of time and money.
Are Styled Stock Photos Effective?
Forget the old school stocks like those of a couple of people wearing gray suits laughing at a computer.
Today’s styled stock photos are real, versatile and very effective especially if you learn how to efficiently personalize them. And with current paradigm shift of marketing where it’s almost all happening online, styled stock images are slowly becoming the primary go to solution for online branding.
You should therefore know what makes a good, styled stock photo and find unique sources of modern styled stock images to get the best of both worlds. This means quick and readily available images at an affordable cost and with the ability to customize and make them your own.
What Makes a Good Styled Stock Photo?
- A good styled stock image must first of all be of high quality and allow customization because there is no other way you’re going to use it besides via customization.
- It should also be able to tie into your brand image. Meaning the styled stock photos that you pick must fuse with your overall brand strategy.
- It must also be able to define the tone and goal of your blog or brand and deliver this message straight to your audience in a memorable way.
- Finally, your photo should also be trendy and up to date. Consumers are constantly looking for current up-to-date content. Your styled stock images must be able to give off this vibe of freshness in order for your content to be considered relevant.
With that said, here are a number of ways you can make the best out of styled stock photos to enhance your online image.
Why Images Matter in Marketing
Marketing using ideal images enables you to tap into something deeper in your audience. Great-styled stock photos when used well will elicit a reaction from your audience and even better, they will help humanize your brand.
Images can easily help you turn transactional relationships into loyalty. Here are good reasons why great business stock images matter for a successful marketing campaign:
They Evoke Emotions
Stock photography speaks to your audience’s emotions more than any other type of content. And they are more visceral than written content. When you use the right stock image, your audience creates deeper associations between your product and how it makes them feel.
For this reason, when picking the business stock images that you will pair with the rest of your online content, choose the ones that are likely to invoke the kind of emotion you will want your audience to feel.
Let the images reflect the message you want to convey and let your images blend smoothly with your overall brand look. This will enable an easier connection with your audience, and it will help them connect to your brand.
Images Are Easy to Identify
The human brain is designed to understand the world visually. It explains why people simply love looking at an image or stock photo.
The human sense of sight takes up to 50% of the brain’s resources.
It’s the dominant sense and this explains why a person will devote more time looking at the image and only scan through written content.
In your marketing campaign, it’s the images that will draw more clicks because they’re simply easier to identify. They will quickly and easily draw people’s attention and when you master how to use the perfect images, you will easily achieve your marketing goals. Lack of images in your content will mean being ignored.
Search engines also favor content with images and they show it first, especially when you have used the right-styled stock photos with a matching optimized copy. Making wise stock photo choices will be very rewarding, read on to see how.
They’re Intuitively Understood
For the natural reason of being able to easily recognize images, it follows that people are intuitively excellent at understanding images too, no matter where they are from. People analyze images very fast, as a matter of fact, they understand images faster than any written content.
For you, this means being able to pick business stock images that will enhance the message you’re sending out. Pairing this with the rest of your content is a sure way to successful marketing. It’s the images that will give your audience the first feel of what you’re offering them.
Images Are Memorable
Images stay longer in your mind. People have the ability to recall information they have seen by up to 65% for content with images and only 10% text-only kind of content. This resounds again why picking the ideal styled stock images for your marketing campaign matters.
You will make it more memorable. So, when your audiences see your images again in the future they will easily remember your brand and if you evoked the right emotions before, they will likely relieve the emotions too.
Great Business Stock Photos Drive Engagement
Do you see a pattern already? This is a natural path, images are easy to identify, evoke emotions, and are easy to remember. And all these make it more likely to be shared.
Content with images gets up to 200% more shares than content without.
As a marketer, coupling your content with the right-styled stock photos will get you more likes, more shares, and more engagement.
Having seen how ideal styled stock photos can boost your marketing campaigns, the next important thing is in knowing these three terms commonly used in styled stock photography that you need to get familiar with.
When using styled stock, it’s important to read over the terms and conditions of the offering site in order to understand the type of attribution required.
But here are some common terms:
Subscription Images – this is when you subscribe to a monthly or annual access to a certain set number of photos from an agency.
Editorial Photo – this refers to an image of a popular person or place or event that has set licensing terms determining how the image can be used. These types of images cannot be used in advertisements or promotional material because the said popular person, place, or event owns the rights as to how their images can be used.
Royalty-Free Images– These are photos that once they’re purchased, the buyer can use as many times as the agency allows without having to pay a royalty to the photographer.
Rights Managed – Here there are restrictions on the use of the photo, but the buyer gets more exclusive rights of the image to a set number of copies or period of time. This is great for marketing because it means that the image or images will not show up everywhere and thus it will be unique from the rest.
Attribution/Credit Link –Attribution means giving credit to the photographer that created the image while a credit link goes further than just identifying the photographer, it also provides a link to the photographer’s website or other digital sources.
Extended License – This is where the buyer is allowed to use the images in more ways including in commercially sold items. It’s a more expensive alternative because it allows more uses than the other licensing options.
Public Domain – PD simply means the copyright has expired and therefore no limits or conditions on how the image can be used. These images are often not of the best quality, as such probably not the best for your marketing campaign.
Best Tips To Style and Use Stock Photos
Method 1: Personalize Your Stock Photos
Just because styled stock images are professionally created doesn’t mean they’re ready to use. You will need to customize them to make them fit into your brand better.
And another key reason why you need to customize styled stock photos is to distinguish yourself from any other brand that might have used the same image. Optimizing styled stock photos also enables you to use the right dimensions that you will need for certain specific uses such as on Instagram, Pinterest or WordPress. It also enables your user to access them e.g. via mobile.
Before downloading your stocks, one design best practice to observe is to always verify their dimensions. Is it for digital consumption or print? This will guide you on how to customize the images.
For this reason, get styled stock images that permit modifications. Here a few ways to personalize your styled stock photos:
Tip 1 – Crop Them
The beauty of styled stock photos is that they come in large formats. This allows for further customization and actually makes it easy. So, as you scout online for great styled stock photos, consider this first.
Before picking a photo, decide where you want to use it because this will guide you on picking cropping dimensions. Different social media platforms and blogs have varying image ratios. And these have a possibility of changing from time to time.
Some of the areas that have different ratios include Instagram feed, Instagram stories, Pinterest boards, Twitter handle and so forth.
There are various styles you can apply when cropping your styled stock photo. You can either:
- Zoom in the specific area that you want to make more prominent then crop it giving it a whole new focus point.
- Crop the image in different required formats such as portrait or landscape.
Styled stock photos are very versatile because once you have styled them differently depending on the platform you will use, you can reuse one image in your social media platforms, your website, blog or other areas such as emails.
Tip 2 – Use Color or Text Overlays
What is a stock photo with overlays? It’s simply placing a semi-transparent layer of your brand color palette on top of the image. You can either create a flat, linear or radial gradient. Very easy to enhance your brand theme and color to create harmony throughout.
You can also add text overlays especially if your photo has white space. If it doesn’t, you can still overlay text where there is a plain area.
Embedding text or color using color overlays to your styled stock photos makes them more real and appealing to your target audience. They can enhance the professional look in your blog, increase trustworthiness and credibility in your content. Text overlays can also boost shares and likes of your blog or social media content as well as increase the click-through rate.
Examples of texts you can embed include your blog title, your ad copy or simply a motivational quote or really, whatever works for your brand.
Tip 3 – Apply a Filter
There are many premium photo filtering apps and tools that you can take advantage of even if you’re a rookie in photo editing. And filters are a fun way of adding style to your stock photo and making them more personal.
Filters are great at enhancing your message tone. Are you playful or urban or simply chilled?
There is a filter for each mood and emotion out there. You can use monochromatic filters, black, white or muted to get the required effect. If you have a bright brand color palette, you can use a saturation filter to enhance the original styled stock photo and give it that desired pop.
Remember the purpose of styled stock photos is to enhance your brand visual recognition. Filters will help create that unique brand feature that will make you easily recognizable. So, not only should you use filters that accentuate your already existing brand theme, you can also pick up to three (max) filters to create a striking but perfectly balanced visual asset.
Tip 4 – Flip Them and Rotate Them
Personalizing your styled stock photos can mean something as simple as a horizontal or vertical flip. The idea is to find a new perspective that helps the rest of your composition convey your message in the best and most outstanding way. If you tried the zoom cropping mentioned above, you can take it a notch higher and flip your photo to get various vistas from the same image.
Still on the cropped idea, you can rotate a cropped styled stock photo. This less used technique can create such a unique style and vibe in your entire composition.
It’s all about experimenting to get the most bespoke look for your brand.
Tip 5 – Create a Photo Collage
When it comes to this stock photo styling tip, you’re spoilt for choice at the number of options you can exploit.
Option a – Combine images from the same stock bundle into one collage
This is not only going to be fun to create, it’s going to be fun to look at too. It’s one of the inside tricks of making a styled stock photo look like an image from an original photo shoot. Out of the same collection of stock photos, combine several images to create one stunning image.
Option b – Combine the cropped images of the same styled stock photo into a collage
Remember the zoomed and cropped images mentioned above? After applying the flip and rotate techniques mentioned as well, you can create several different sets of the same image in various ways to get something that you’re guaranteed no one will have.
And if you’re adventurous, you can even apply filter differently to these images to create your ideal style that will best represent your brand. Or if not, you could simply apply your brand color palettes to complete this art of intrigue and end up with a stylish brand image for your online marketing.
Option c- Use different styled stock photos from different sources to create a stunning collage
At this point you’ve already seen how fun working with styled stock photos can be. Browse for different photos that have a matching theme to your original style from different sources in order for your end product to have harmony.
You can create a stunning collage with these images following all the cropping, flipping and rotating techniques discussed above. All these variations can be used on various platforms, the key thing is to understand what your brand message is conveying and ensure to achieve that.
Tip 6 – Apply a Blur Effect
This styling technique is ideal when you want to use your stock photo as a secondary focal element and something else like text to take the center stage. For example, think about a blog banner with a text overlay. Because the text is what you want you readers to see, the background image can be blurred to eliminate the crisp detail that may distract the viewer’s eye.
Tip 7- Add a Frame or Border
This is a simple tip to apply but can add such a chic touch to your styled stock photo especially when done right. The secret is to go easy, don’t add very thick borders or very busy orders and frames that will instead distract the viewer, when using these, the idea is to complete your composition and seal it elegantly.
This technique is perfect for Instagram photos and for Pinterest pins. It can also spruce up your blog images, blog thumbnails and so on.
Method 2- Combine Styled Stock Photos With a Few Custom Made Photos
If you have a budget and time to create a few custom photos, well “tres bien”. You can combine these with styled stock photos to create an elegant balance in your online branding.
This will also help you balance your wallet because let’s face it, shoots are expensive. But styled stock photos are not. So, with the above tips on how to personalize your styled stock photos, you can incorporate these same techniques when blending in your original images.
What Tools Can You Use To Personalize Your Stock Images?
Unique quality and crisp images are the lifeblood of your online branding and even the greatest content cannot thrive without them. But making styled stock photos personal and getting them to blend with the rest of your branding theme can be very time consuming.
However, there are tools (and some of them free) that can help you achieve your final look, even with zero graphic design skills.
Thus, no matter which technique you want to apply on your styled stock photos, here are the best tools you can use:
Canva – it’s one of the best out there, has numerous templates and features that can help you achieve all the techniques given above. It can crop, overlay text with various fonts, and straighten a photo and so on. And the best part is that it has a free account option if you don’t want to subscribe. It’s also very user friendly.
PicMonkey– This tool is excellent for giving your styled stock photo that crystal clear finish. It comes with more features than Canva even though it doesn’t have as many templates as Canva. But it has great effects to touch up your styled stock photos and is capable of creating the collages mentioned above, cropping, and so on.
It’s a great tool for anyone who’s not interested in advanced technical programs that can bog you down. And you can create stunning final products from styled stock photos in just a few minutes.
Others include GIMP, Pixlr Editor and Fotor, TinyPNG
Conclusion
As this styled stock photography tutorial just showed styled stock photos will be exceptionally successful when it’s not obvious that they are stock photos. Do everything you can to personalize your styled stock photos and blend them with your brand theme to make them more effective. With that said, don’t shy away from playing around with all the possible techniques listed above to get a final product that will help your content strive and even go viral.
