7 Killer Ways to Use Product Photography as Marketing
Product photography is a vital marketing tool, especially in the age of social media. Unfortunately, most people don’t use it to its full potential. The right strategy and a little bit of luck can turn it into the cornerstone of a marketing campaign that will get excellent results and a fairly low price.
1- Digital Stores
The easiest and most common way to make use of product photography is to include it in a digital store. The vast majority of customers are much more willing to buy a product that they can see than one that they cannot, even if the appearance of the product isn’t terribly important. The effect is even larger for products such as clothing, where the appearance is one of the most important qualities. In those cases, a good product photo can make a huge difference.
2- Trending Pictures
Social media platforms are the fastest and cheapest way to get an image out to a huge number of people. Sites such as Instagram have users that can send out an image to thousands of followers at once, and many people follow those users so that they can get product recommendations. Building up this sort of social media presence does take time, but companies that succeed in doing so can get access to one of the most powerful marketing tools on the planet. Companies that are extremely lucky will manage to get an image to go viral, which can easily cause millions of potential customers to learn about a product over the course of just a few days.
3- Caption Contests
People have an easier time remembering products that they have interacted with than those that they have not. One easy way to get people to interact with your products is to have a caption contest. Be sure to use a slightly silly picture of the product for this purpose to make sure that the contestants have something to work with. People who laugh at the submissions are likely to share them on social media, which can make even more people learn about your products. The captions will cause an emotional response that gets linked with the product, so they are also more likely to remember it than they would if many other methods had been used.
4- How-To Guides
Publishing a guide that explains how to use your product is a great way to send out pictures of it without it looking like a marketing effort. It’s also a great way to target your advertising towards the people who are most likely to use your product. You can write guides about any problem that your product could help solve, even if solving that problem is not the product’s primary use. As long as the association is reasonable, you’ll be able to expose plenty of interested people to your product without too much effort and give them a clear reason to purchase it at the same time.
5- Building Collections
Consider the merits of publishing your product photos as part of a larger collection. That will allow you to market your product towards people who were already looking for one of the other items in the set, which gives you a chance to target a new market. You can combine this technique with a discounted bundle of products to make it even more powerful.
6- Creating Associations
Brain Paul Studios Inc. said, “The best marketing campaigns cause people to form connections between emotions and products.” You can do so by tailoring the background and props in your product photo to evoke a specific emotional response. For example, you could remind people of fun and adventure by taking a photo of someone using your product in an exotic environment. Be sure to keep the themes fairly realistic, because people are more likely to laugh at an unlikely scenario than they are to form a good association from it.
7- Featured Content
Content creators are always looking for ideas and props. If you’re willing to take some time to work out the details, you can often find some that would be happy to feature your product in their show. Many of them will want a product photograph that they can use to create special effects, so being able to provide one immediately can be an asset.
