Good photography is essential for any business – whether your product is visual or not. High-quality images vs stock photos can build customer trust, increase the chance of a sale and raise brand awareness.

A quick and cheap fix for a lot of businesses to reach for stock photos – but while stock photos have their place, if they’re the only visuals representing your brand, it can result in your online presence feeling hollow and impersonal.

Hiring a professional photographer to get some great shots of your business will:

Show of your brand’s personality.

Photographs can help to give more insight into your business: who you are, who’s in your team and what your business stands for.

Consumers are less likely to engage with a faceless company. They want a real person, someone who cares about their customers and about providing good quality products and services. Adding personality to your business could be the reason why your customers choose you from one of your competitors. Customers are more likely to buy with brands that they feel connected to.

Showcase your services and products in the best light.

If you sell physical products, the quality of your product photography has a huge impact on sales.

When consumers are buying online, they need to be able to clearly see what they are purchasing. A professional photographer is not only able to take great quality photos but also present your products in the right angles, showcasing even the smaller details and considering aspects that wouldn’t have even crossed your mind, such as lighting, editing and backgrounds. Using bad quality images could be what is stopping your business from reaching its full potential. If your images aren’t of good quality, then your customer may hesitate to purchase them, or may even look elsewhere.

Make your business more authentic.

Whether you offer a service or sell a product, good photography is always the best option over stock photography.

While stock photos can be a useful, quick and cost-effective choice, they’re generic and aren’t able to truly reflect your brand or the people who work for it. Stock photos can also seem staged and cheesy, and due to their high saturation on the internet, customers can see through them and not trust you.

What’s more, the stock photos you use are more than likely being used on other websites – not only does this add to the problem of your brand feeling generic, it can also cause problems of your brand being wrongly associated with another brand that does not share the same values or high-quality services as you.

As a minimum, use real-life images of your business on the core pages of your website – your home, about, services and product pages.

Would you like to know more about how you can make your brand stand out online? Get in touch with a member of our team today.