For small businesses and bootstrapped startups, coming up with great branding on a shoestring budget can be the cause of more than one headache. But a bad branding strategy would be far worse.
While stock photos might not be your first thought when looking for ways to enforce your brand awareness, they are quite resourceful for branding and commercial use… if you know what you’re doing.
This article explores the right way to use stock photos for branding even if you’re not a graphic designer or marketer, with a simple three-step guide to the perfect branding images.
Ready to learn about visual branding?
Preface: The Truth About Brand Image and Stock Photos
Before getting to the graphic design side of using stock photos to brand your business, let’s quickly address basic concerns and misconceptions about the marriage between branding and stock photography.
Won’t Stock Photos Hurt My Company Image?
If you search for “how to do visual branding”, you’ll stumble upon people advising against using stock photography, and more or less openly saying that stock photos are bad for this.
They’ll mention how stock photos are and look low quality, and that will reflect poorly on your brand’s quality. That they are too generic and can fall under clichés, washing out your company’s relevance. Finally, the stock images you pick are already in use by everyone and their mother, including your competitors, and that erases any chance of differentiation and uniqueness for your brand. But you know what? They’re wrong. These points might have been valid a decade ago, but stock photography has evolved, and those are non-issues today.
It’s very easy to identify and license great, high-value stock images, and it’s also very simple to make them look native to your brand.
To learn how just follow the three steps below! If you're an absolute beginner, our pro editing tips for beginners are a great start, too! And here you can learn what not to do in terms of visual communication for your brand!
And don't miss our guide to unlock the benefits of reverse image search when looking for stock photos!
What is Branding? Why Should I Bother with It?
A marketer would define branding as setting up a name, symbol, or design that becomes easily associated with your company, to visually identify it. Furthermore, branding is also about making sure all your marketing strategy elements are consistent with your brand identity.
In plain terms, it means to make sure everything in your company is aligned under the same concept. That when you post an Instagram story, the content in it fits your Instagram wall, and your LinkedIn profile, and your website, and your ads, even your stationery design. They are all parts of a whole, and together they tell the world what your brand is about.
Having a brand image that sets you aside from competitors and that people can immediately connect to your product or service is absolutely critical to succeed in business.
Visual branding, from brand color combinations to photography, is more impactful and high-converting than any other marketing trick you try.
Step 1: Do the Groundwork Around Brand Image
You cannot know what photos are ideal for your brand image if you haven’t first defined your brand image to a tee. The first step, then, is to do your marketing homework:
- Define your brand identity – Go beyond what you sell and what for, and think about the top 3 brand-defining factors:
- Goal: what your company sets to achieve
- Tone: what’s your voice and what it says
- Style: how do you want people to perceive you
- Know your audience – Don’t stay with just demographics, get to know your potential customers well!
- Build your brand’s narrative – Take all the data you collected in the previous steps, and turn it into a passionate baseline story to market your company
- Create a visual personality – Transform your brand story into a visual one! Select content as bricks to build up your visual story: color combinations, graphic styles, photography aesthetic, etc.
1. Identity: This brand wants to help its users reach all their objectives efficiently, and enjoy every step of the way.
2. Audience: The app is aimed at professional women, mainly aged 18 to 45, who have to fit in a lot in a day: competitive students, working mothers, business owners, etc.
3. Narrative: They are a team of women who know first-hand the struggles of staying on top of their to-do lists, and the added stress of missing the mark, and they've used their experience to produce a simple yet effective solution.
4. Visual personality: They've selected peach, white and black accents for their logo and brand color palette, and they will use very stylish, minimalist, feminine photography for their visuals.
Step 2: Find the Perfect Stock Images
There is an overwhelming amount of photos available online, finding the perfect image for your brand can seem an impossible task. If you follow these tips you’ll realize it’s a lot easier:
- Find a stock photo agency ally – When looking around stock photo sites to download images, analyze their catalogs and prioritize the stock library that better aligns with your brand’s visual personality. There are many great stock photo providers, but not all are a good match for every business. For example, Photocase has an artsy, quirky, and fun vibe, while Shutterstock is the king of commercial-like imagery, and iStock is a mix of both that takes commercial-styled photos and adds a little artistic twist.
Pro Tip: Stock photo subscriptions offer the best value for your money. Spend some time studying agencies’ styles and buy a subscription to the one where you know you can find the most on-brand images for your business. - Consider mood & composition of photos – When it comes to selecting photos for branding purposes it is equally important to analyze both the overall technical and artistic quality, as well as the image’s mood; what it evokes and to whom is it speaking. A photo of a person using their iPhone can drastically change its meaning if the subject is a teenager than if it is someone in their 60s, or if it’s gloomy versus well-lit.
- Aim to be diverse and inclusive –Diversity and inclusion are the biggest social trends of our times, not aligning your brand to them would be a big mistake. There are many collections with diverse stock photos that represent minorities as well as multicultural groups in a beautiful, honest, and modern way.
- Go for high-quality images – As we briefly mentioned before, quality is crucial in photos for branding, as the images’ quality will affect how people perceive your brand. It doesn’t just mean shot with the ultimate gear and sharply edited. But also by a skilled professional and having a clear artistic and visual relevance.
It's also important that these images look great on every display, so make sure to choose mobile-friendly images.
Step 3: Make Your Stock Photos Natively Unique
Remember how earlier we spoke about stock photo detractors would mention these images are too generic and overused to use in branding? This is where we –and you– prove them wrong. Because not only are today’s stock photos a lot less generic than they used to be but there are also simple, creative ways to make them look and feel like they were made for your brand:
- Select photos that tell a story – Visual storytelling is a fruitful marketing resource! Telling your brand’s story with images is a lot more likely to make an impact on your audience, versus just pretty pictures that have no connection with anything beyond the moment.
Pro Tip: When you find a stock photo you love, make sure to check that artist’s portfolio page on the stock photo agency; very often they’ll have a whole series of images from that same photo shoot, and others using the same models. These are great for enforcing a visual story! - Have a consistent photography aesthetic – We already covered the relevance of mood and style of images. It is also important to keep that consistent over time, too. If you have a happy-go-lucky photo followed by ten noir-styled images, people will be confused.
- Edit the images to make them your own – Stock photos are versatile not because they are generic, but because they are fully editable; through creative editing, you can achieve a final image that is entirely unique to your brand, even if the same image is used by others, elsewhere. Filters, color treatments, cropping, overlays… there are many resources to personalize your stock photos so no one can tell they are stock!
- Be in line with all other marketing resources – You’ll often use visuals in combination with other resources: copy is the most common one. Be it overlaid on your images or as a text block accompanying them, photos and copy are a team, and they have to look, feel, and be perceived as such. Make sure your font style is aligned with the photographic style –and your brand image as a whole–; this is particularly relevant for infographics. And content-wise, have coherence and consistency between what is said in words and what is said with images, at all times.
They've found a goldmine in the form of Kastoimages’ portfolio on Photocase, as it's full of images in the same bright style, portraying the same model in everything from working to exercising to attending a doctor’s appointment and traveling, that they can use in their stories! They'll also make sure to include cool flat lays by VICUSCHKA, and inclusive shots of professional women by Criene, which despite being produced by different photographers, are all visually coherent and fit the brand's narrative perfectly.
They'll take it a step further by using cropping and filtering strategically, to make the photos even more personal to the app.
And that's how they're finally on track to successfully brand their product and company!
Stock Photos are a Good –And Undermined– Branding Resource
Before reading this, would you have known it’ll take 3 steps to have great branding imagery ready to use?
Well, now you do! Our goal here was to show you how stock photos can elevate your brand if you use them correctly, and how relatively simple it is to do so.
As long as you:
- Know exactly what your brand image is
- Put thought and care in choosing stock photos
- Make them feel unique to your brand
You’ll be capable to build a strong and memorable brand in your own right.
Happy branding!
