Seventy-six percent of people believe that the marketing world has changed more in the past two years than it has in the previous fifty. Marketing campaigns have multiple components, covering all types of media. There is a multitude of factors in designing a marketing campaign, but with digital marketing, the importance of photography can be one of the most essential considerations in creating a marketing strategy.
Here, we’ll explore digital marketing and the use and role of photography in your endeavors to promote your brand or product.
The Definition Of Digital Marketing
What, exactly, is digital marketing and how does it differ from traditional marketing? The industry has changed drastically in the last two years. It encompasses all of the digital platforms consumers use every day, including video, email, podcasts, blogs, and social media.
These platforms differ from traditional marketing, which includes television advertising, billboards, and fliers. At a very basic level, you can think of digital marketing as marketing that can reach consumers who are using their smartphones throughout the day.
A large-scale digital marketing campaign might encompass advertising on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, blog posts, and even podcasts. Today, it’s impossible to put together a comprehensive marketing plan without incorporating some type of digital marketing, and it is entirely possible to launch a marketing campaign on a grand scale and to only employ digital marketing.
In order to reach the widest possible audience, any marketing strategy should be based on reaching smartphone users, running on any and all popular platforms they frequent.
Importance of photography for continuity
While videography may be the most important component of your digital marketing strategy, still photography should also be considered an important aspect of any program. While videos are played across all types of social media, if at any time your campaign will be represented by a still shot, videography should be replaced by photography.
Your photographs should provide continuity between live and still applications and professional still photography, rather than mere captures of a live video, which will give weight to the campaign.
You want to be sure that whatever format you are using to convey your ideas, there is continuity between them, making it clear that every piece of printed material is a supplement to the ways your campaign is expressed digitally. Photography can also be massively important for blog posts, as blog posts without photography are almost unheard of in the current online climate.
It is also common to incorporate traditional marketing with digital marketing, under which circumstances you will likely need an entire photography spread for printed materials like brochures, billboards, and newspaper or magazine advertisements.
If email marketing is a part of your digital campaign, you will need eye-catching photography for the emails you are sending, as the pictures are the first thing anyone sees. If there are images that pop up in a (likely) unsolicited email, you have no hope of a click through if the photography isn’t fresh and clearly representative of the product/brand/customer.
Consumers are so busy these days that you only have a few seconds of a look for them to decide whether or not they are interested in reading/perusing further. That pressure can end up entirely on the photographer to create compelling images that entice the viewer to stay engaged.
Photography In Print: A Hypothetical Case Study
Once you have launched your digital marketing campaign and established yourself on all platforms, you’ll want to be sure to replicate your branding in any kind of customer-facing environment or non-digital materials. Much of your online content may be video, but once a customer gets to your store or picks up one of your brochures, photography is what will carry your online content forward and make your campaign recognisable.
Let’s use a case study, for example, of a cellular phone service provider. In this example, the company chooses an actor to be the face of their campaign. There are YouTube advertisements, Instagram video posts and stories, Facebook videos, and more, all featuring this particular actor.
Their face becomes familiar. Through this actor, the cellular service company builds a rapport with its customers, to whom this actor is endearing and captivating.
This cellular service provider may employ any number of print media as a part of this campaign. They may have brochures or shelf talkers at stores like Best Buy or Costco where their phones and plans are sold outside of their own stores. They may offer group discounts for large businesses, and provide brochures about their services for Human Resources to disseminate. They may have some kind of handout available in the student center of universities.
In all of these locations, on all of this print media, there will be still photography of this now well-known, familiar actor the world has come to know and love, and associate with a brand that is smart/sincere/empathetic/not-too-serious – or whatever this campaign has been crafted to say about the company or its product.
This imagery should not be limited to the campaign, as it exists outside the digital world and also outside of the actual stores. When the customers who recognize this actor as the face of the campaign/product/company come into the cellular provider’s store, that actor’s face needs to be everywhere, reinforcing whatever it is that customer has felt about the campaign.
This can be done easily with wrapped canvas prints of single images or a photo collage, which can be swapped for freshening or a change in campaign direction.
Importance of photography … how to choose
If you are in the position to select a photographer for your marketing campaign, think of what would catch your eye in a hurry, as if you were scrolling through everything that you see on a regular basis on social media platforms.
What kind of eye-catching message would capture your attention long enough to peruse an advertisement beyond the email? In a single photograph within an email, the feelings you want to convey in your marketing campaign should be readily apparent.
Because of the amount of time given to an unsolicited email or to an Instagram or Facebook advertisement, at some point in your strategy, the photograph or photographs you select may need to encompass the totality of your campaign.
In selecting the type of photography you want to use, you should approach it from the point of view of a busy viewer, without the time or the desire to read a caption or any kind of email copy, but glancing at an image briefly. Will it hold their attention? In order to ensure it does, the style, subject matter, and feeling of the photographs must be considered carefully.
Still photography may seem like the stuff of a bygone era of marketing, but it certainly is not. Traditional photography can and should be incorporated with any kind of digital campaign, in order to bring continuity and to bolster the awareness of the effort.
Photography is absolutely one of the main pillars of an advertising campaign and should be one of the first things taken into account when selecting the components of a successful marketing program. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so selecting the right photography can provide the foundation your campaign needs to make any copy nearly obsolete.