With brands and customers alike riding the ecommerce wave that’s been accelerated by the lack of opportunity for physical retail, ensuring that your ecommerce photography is on point has never been more crucial.
A key element of ecommerce photography is making sure it reflects the brand you’re working with, and captures the imagination of your intended audience. With ecommerce sales growing to reach a third of all UK sales in May of last year, it’s never been more important to capture and optimise imagery specifically for online.
The seventy7 collective is full of talent that comes together to boost brands through top-tier planning, creation and delivery of content. Our decades of experience puts us well ahead of the pack, keep reading to find out our advice on how to capture imagery for ecommerce, as well as the best ways to enhance it for your audience.
Ben Edwards, Iain Dickens, and Garry Stevenson are Senior Photographers in our London studios, while Joshua Jackson is a Photographer who works from our Manchester studios. They’ve been capturing ecommerce imagery collectively with seventy7 for a long time. Their vast portfolios encompass various photographic disciplines, with specialist work in still life, beauty, fashion and food. They’ve offered up some of their knowledge on how to create the perfect product photography.
The importance of planning how photos are going to work online cannot be underestimated. This should absolutely be an integral part of your planning process. No matter how well you create something, if it isn’t delivered to the right audience, then you’ve missed out on a huge opportunity.
Getting this right has to come as part of the brief for a photography campaign: where are the photos going to be used? Will they be organically posted through social media? Will they live on a website? Are they going to be pushed through on paid social? Keep reading to see just how imagery and digital marketing work together in the current ecommerce climate.
Optimising imagery to make sure that it doesn’t get punished by SEO algorithms is crucial, but not the only part of your digital objectives. Your images should be working as hard as possible for the brand you’re shooting for.
It can be as simple as simply saving the name of the photo under a descriptive filename which contains a keyword:
Non-optimized file name: IMG-03625-250×250
SEO-friendly file name: scarlet-tealight-candle-closeup-250×250
It’s also worth remembering that SEO and UX are intrinsically linked: the easier and quicker your site is to navigate, the more likely it is to generate more traffic. This means that things like large images that take a while to load will be punished by certain Google algorithms. So as amazing as your photos are, always take care to compress them so they don’t slow down the intended brand’s site.
It doesn’t matter if you have the fastest site, the most creative copy or the best value for money. Having professional standard photography in your marketing will make the difference between converting a customer and them choosing the competition.
Rob Goodison – Digital Marketing Manager
Images draw people in much quicker than plain text (although good accompanying copy is important). By getting their message across quicker, images can hold an audience’s attention and can give a much stronger introduction to a product than plain copy.
PPC advertising is where most audiences first come into contact with a brand through targeted messaging. Because their expectations and general consumer behaviours are shifting with the times, it’s so important that the imagery you capture reflects those shifts.
Imagery for PPC is designed to get audiences to stop scrolling and take action. That generally comes through well-thought-out campaigns featuring familiar faces that represent a brand. You want people to want these products.
The marketing powerhouse is continually demanding innovation in the way products are being presented, so having excellent photographic content at hand is more important than ever.
Read more from our experts about planning, creating, delivering and optimising product photography here.
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