“I knew I shouldn’t have ever used stock photos on my website.” said every experienced marketer ever.

But why? Stock photos are of good quality and low cost (or sometimes even free). 

However, it’s difficult to find stock photos or Google Images that are consistent in quality and composition to help you reflect your brand personality. Now, clients don’t want to just browse a website, they want to experience it. And one of the ways you can give them that is by optimising each photo you upload. By “optimization”, we mean three things: 

1. Making images look attractive. 
2. Using images that load quickly.
3. Using images that make it easy for search engines to index. 

Photography and web design go hand-in-hand, so in this post we’ve zeroed in on some ways you can use images to appeal to existing clients, and boost your conversion rates by creatively using photos. 

• Give Your Images A Human Touch: Human faces elicit an emotional response. In web design, it means inspiring that visual preference for faces, and more engagement when you put them near your call-to-action regions. Faces are known to draw the eye, as a study conducted by a paintings website Medalia Art shows. As a test, they replaced images of the paintings with photos of the artist. As a result, their conversion rates and user engagement went through the roof, and so can yours. 

• Create An Impression Through Color: Colors have a powerful psychological effect in web design. You can either create a monochromatic theme (and involve one dominant color in varying tones), or use a color palette that you think embodies the essence of your brand, instead of just stereotypical color associations. 

• Super-size Your Backgrounds: Photos speak louder than words ever can. Modern web design emphasizes simplicity; this means single – or grid format – photos and minimal text. A single image/video that describes the essence of your brand creates a stronger impression than a few images and more text. 

• Include Interactive Images: Also known as the “hover effect”, it creates an element of surprise in your website clients by changing an image when (of course) their cursor hovers over it without activating. You can use this interactive feature to showcase how to use a product/service, the team page to display employee personalities, or validate through existing customers’ positive experiences.

• Use Charts and Graphs: Again, images help you show, not tell. Infographics and visuals help break complex statistical data down for your clients to understand your brand better, thus increasing feelings of trust and reliability.

• Add Your Company’s Own Photos: People can tell it isn’t your brand when you put up photos of two people shaking hands in suits. Use your own company’s photos, whether at work, in meetings, on trips – to convey your brand’s culture and connect with your audience on a deeper level. For example, using performing photos when you’re a recycling company means instead of using photos of a generic recycling machines, use one that displays your employees at work. Check out these photography websites for tips.

• And Finally, Stick To High Quality Photos: Not something that requires a lot of explaining, but using high-definition images (that may or may not be stock photos) that look professional, present the spirit of your brand ethos, and don’t look staged or cheesy goes a long way in appealing to your users and adding substance to your website. 

This list might seem like a lot, but we promise it’ll get faster and easier once you’ve gotten used to the process (and bookmarked this page so you can refer back to it). The Tribe of Brands team can help you stay on top of trends to effectively navigate the complex waters of the internet. Our marketing agency can help you with further ideas of how to design world-class websites, seamless user journeys and digital marketing campaigns.