Branding is integral to how a business builds awareness and promotes its message, and a good standard of photos is absolutely central to that. But by ‘good photos’ we don’t just mean your favourite photos of your dog or a recent holiday, or images with personal meaning or which provoke nice memories, we mean professional photos delivered with style, directed content and control.

Professional photos enable a brand to promote a message that is bold, measured and consistent, so a business that is serious about its branding needs to build a portfolio of strong images it can call on and build a campaign around. These images can:

- Help to build a strong brand
- Be re-used to create uniformity and a stable message
- Evolve to build a theme that is organic and ongoing for future use
- Enable your product or service to be easily and instantly identifiable, much like a logo
- Be a medium that you have complete control over in terms of how your business is portrayed

When you are looking for ideas for good photos to use in branding you are wanting these images to be visually appealing, engaging to the right audience and to ask questions or prompt some intrigue. You can tailor your images to the right age and market demographic, and ensure that they are carrying the right message; perhaps how or where you see your product or service being used, or the type of person you imagine using it. These images can be aspirational or inspirational, the key is, they can carry the message you want to portray.

Websites: Strong images are vital in attracting people to websites and keeping them engaged on a page without clicking off immediately.

Social media: An essential tool to a business big on branding, social media can reach the right people instantly and repeatedly and can carry a strong and consistent visual message which ties in with your other visual mediums.

Advertising: You can extend your social media messaging with good images to base adverts around, be that online, in a magazine, on a billboard, on social media or on TV.

Company branding: Photos are a great way to carry a theme through all levels of the business, and though we might attach these to the mediums referenced above, this can also be extended to email footers, business cards and invoices, maybe even shop front windows if that applies to you. We all see company branding that often fails to inspire, but we remember the ones that stand out from the crowd.

Blog content: A blog gives a business space to develop a theme and extend a visual message. This is where you can use the same photos but offer more visual content and maybe a variation which offers images that haven’t been seen before? A blog is a great way to keep customers engaged by offering them something exclusive, and good photos can also be used to break up long segments of text, to keep a reader engaged.

If you are serious about creating a strong brand, then it is worth the investment in a professional photographer. Trying to do something yourself might be an attraction, but professionals are in the business for a reason; ie. they have the time, skills and equipment to do it right. And if you find a fitting photography partner, they can help you find the right images and themes whilst allowing you to retain creative control.

You can search for images that you like and research who did them. Professional photographers don’t necessarily need to be local anymore, this can all be done remotely if necessary. The key is finding a visual theme you like and finding someone you trust to help you build something similar. And from there, you are a long way towards building the kind of branding you always wanted.

Are you looking to start a new branding or design project? Get in touch with Rebus today.