Capturing Your Brand: Using Photography to Elevate Your Brand and Website
Blog Post
In today's competitive legal industry, establishing a strong and professional online presence is essential for law firms looking to stand out. One powerful tool that firms can leverage to help elevate their brand is brand photography.
Whether through professional headshots, office shots, or images that convey the firm's values, brand photography can help create a polished image that resonates with potential clients, boosts engagement, and even improves search engine optimization (SEO) and website performance. In this post, we’ll explore how investing in brand photography can elevate your firm's reputation and drive stronger client connections.
What is brand photography?
Brand photography refers to a specialized type of photography that visually represents a firm, company, organization, or individual's brand identity. It involves creating a consistent collection of professional images that align with a brand’s values, mission, products or services, and overall aesthetic. These images are used across various marketing channels, such as websites, social media, advertising, and promotional materials, to help create a cohesive visual narrative.
Stock vs. custom photography: which one should my firm use?
Before we address the question of “Which type of photography should my firm use”, we must explore key differences between the two.
What is stock photography?
Stock photography is a collection of images that can be licensed for use in various projects, such as websites, advertisements, publications, and more. These images are typically created by professional photographers and are available for purchase through online stock photo agencies.
Common Uses of Stock Photography:
- Website design: To add visual interest to the design and encourage user interaction with content.
- Advertising: To create visually attractive ads for print or digital media.
- Publications: To illustrate articles, resources, and other printed materials.
- Presentations: To enhance the visual impact of presentations and speaking engagements.
Pros of Using Stock Photography:
- Pre-made images: You don't need to hire a photographer or take your own photos.
- Diverse subjects: Stock photo libraries offer a wide range of images, from people and landscapes to objects and abstract concepts.
- Royalty-free licensing: Most stock photo agencies offer royalty-free licenses, meaning you pay a one-time fee and can use the image as many times as you need.
- High quality: Stock photos are generally high-resolution and suitable for various formats.
Popular Stock Photo Agencies:
How do I choose stock photography for my firm’s website?
When choosing to use stock photography for your brand materials, it’s important to still consider underlying principles that will help maintain visual continuity. Before sourcing stock photography, consider what message or image you want to portray and then create a set of guidelines and characteristics to be followed.
Consider our client, RSG. RSG’s main brand colour is dark blue, and the website uses blue significantly throughout its designs. Before we began sourcing stock images to include on the firm’s service and insights pages, we established that all images should include warm tones to help balance the cool tones of the brand colours.
This simple yet effective guideline made it easy to source a bank of strategic images while simultaneously upholding visual cohesion across the website and other brand materials.
Choosing stock photography isn’t rocket science but should be curated in such a way that images feel like they are related and strategic to the brand, even if they’re not custom-made.
What is custom photography?
Custom brand photography is a tailored approach to curating unique images that specifically represent a brand's identity and messaging. Unlike stock photography, which offers generic images, custom brand photography is designed to capture the essence of a particular brand and its unique selling points.
Key Aspects of Custom Brand Photography:
- Brand-specific: Images are created to align with the brand's visual style, values, and target audience.
- Unique content: Photos are exclusive to the brand and cannot be found elsewhere.
- Storytelling: Images can be used to tell the brand's story and convey its message.
- Consistency: Custom photography helps ensure a consistent visual experience across all marketing materials.
Pros of Using Custom Brand Photography:
- Strong brand identity: Creates a recognizable and memorable brand image.
- Increased engagement: Visually appealing content can attract and increase user engagement.
- Improved credibility: High-quality custom photography can enhance the brand's perceived value and build trust with clients.
How do I use custom photography on my firm’s website?
Custom brand photography can significantly enhance a law firm's brand and website by creating visually appealing and engaging content. By using high-quality, custom images on the homepage, about us page, services pages, careers page, and contact page, law firms can strengthen their brand identity, improve user experience, and showcase their expertise.
A good brand photographer will work with the firm to understand its values, objectives, and target audiences.
Consider our client, Torkin Manes, who incorporates both custom and stock photography on their website. Recruitment and retention are important aspects of the firm’s culture, and understanding the benefits of custom photography, they hired a photographer to take custom candid and group photos to be included on their Join Us pages. By incorporating real imagery of the firm’s people, they were able to create a series of pages that are highly personalized and accurately depict the firm.
By strategically incorporating custom photography into your brand, you have the potential to build customer trust by creating a sense of authenticity and credibility. You can also improve brand awareness by making the brand more distinct, memorable, and recognizable.
Conclusion
So… returning to our original question: should you use stock or custom photography?
The answer: probably both.
Stock photography is an efficient, cost-effective tool that can enhance website content. It’s best suited for use in blogs, insights, news, etc., as it can be great for illustrating ideas, themes, and concepts that relate to the specific content. A relevant thumbnail image can also make content stand out and encourage user interaction.
Custom photography, on the other hand, should be leveraged on pages such as the home, about the firm, team, careers, and contact pages. These are among your firm’s most visited pages and should be used to establish a personal, genuine rapport with your clients and users.
Whether you use stock photography, custom photography, or a combination of the two, it’s essential that your collection of professional images align with a brand’s values, mission, products or services, and overall aesthetic.
To learn more about how Cubicle Fugitive can help take your website to the next level, visit our website design and development expertise page: https://www.cubiclefugitive.com/expertise/detail/website-design-and-development