This is something that the majority of businesses are aware of; therefore, the amount of competition is pretty high. All this means that you as a marketer have to go the extra mile and offer something that the competition is not offering.
This is where photo editing services are necessary, or even an in-house photo editor. A lot can be achieved with smart photo marketing. Therefore, let’s get into the interesting details of how images and photo editing can help you create a better social media marketing strategy.
4 Ways Photo Editing Can Boost Your Social Media Efforts
Overall impact of images on people
The average consumer’s attention span is fairly short nowadays, as millions of people are continuously bombarded with marketing materials wherever they turn.
For example, you go outside and you see a billboard advertisement, or you turn on TV to watch a movie, and advertisements pop up, or you go online, there are ads everywhere, starting from search engine results to the pages of your favorite websites.
Ads have even penetrated the mobile market applications which pop up every couple of minutes. All this has led to a great reduction in customer’s attention spans, making it necessary to actually offer something extremely eye catching to successfully grab the visitor’s attention.
Adding images to your posts is an effective way of not only attracting visitors and potential customers, but also a great way to engage people. The higher the engagement on the post, the more people are going to see it.
According to the MIT report, the underlying reasons for this kind of behavior lies in the fact that people tend to create emotional, mental or social connection to the image displayed to their eyes. This is the main reason why their Facebook posts with images receive 37% more engagement.
But how can photo editing help in the whole process? Let’s take a look:
1. Telling a story to your audience
Images are a perfect medium because they can be added on any social media network and are a perfect way to tell a story. For example, if you are running a tourist agency that sells accommodations in various places across the globe, making posts on Facebook or Instagram without images is quite pointless.
You want to show to the visitors what they are going to experience, it will make them wish to visit a location you are talking about, as they can see and imagine the feeling of being in the actual room. On the other hand, branding in all lines of work is essential for successfully achieving long-term growth. Images serve to create a great follow-up to the story you are trying to convey.
Take Coca-Cola, for example; every single image this company uses on social media networks portrays people with broad smiles. It makes you subconsciously connect drinking this drink with good family times, or fun times spent with friends.
Photo editing comes in pretty handy, because it lets you create your signature across all posts. For example, Schweppes always creates black and white images for their marketing campaigns, but keeps only the yellow color to emphasize their brand. Also, there are always great captions which make people think about drinking their product. This is their signature which is achieved exclusively with great photo editing.
It all comes down to how creative your social media marketing team is, and what story and signature they can think off.
2. Shifting image styles for different target audiences
There are different social media networks out there. As each of them counts millions of customers and it is clear that there are those who prefer different social networks due to different reasons. The conclusion is that there are different target audiences you are appealing too.
For example, images on Tumblr greatly differ from images on Instagram or Pinterest. This implies that it is necessary to create specific image materials for different online locations. This is where photo editing plays an important role, especially when you take into consideration that you’ll need images of different sizes for different social media networks.
3. Brand consistency
Brand consistency is something that many businesses fail to respect. You cannot advertise your business without telling a single story, without creating a style and using consistent design elements across all your marketing channels.
For example, imagine that the color you want to use on your website is completely different from the colors which dominate images created for marketing. This can cause a lot of confusion for the customers and will make it harder to establish a memorable brand. People need to see the same things appear on different channels to more easily memorize your brand.
4. Higher customer engagement
Achieving higher engagement is necessary for making “trending” posts which show up in feeds of a higher number of people. Images play an important role in achieving higher engagement across company’s social media channels.
According to Hubspot’s infographic, great looking images generate 94% more views on your social media posts. One of the main benefits that also come with great looking photos is the potential for the post to become more viral. Additionally, using visual content generates a 65% increase in engagement only after a month.
All this shows how effective eye catching images are for a marketing strategy, making photo editing quite important as well.
The only question remains, whether it is better to hire an in-house photo editor or outsource the job to a company which offers photo editing services. If you are planning to hire an in-house editor, make sure that he or she is skilled with various types of photo editing software tools, as it can help you greatly reduce costs in the long run.If you haven’t already included great looking photos in your marketing campaigns, it is definitely time to do so. It is one of the best ways to significantly increase engagement, brand awareness and the number of customers.
