If you’re an entrepreneur with a new product to sell, you’ll inevitably arrive at the decision to take your own product photos or hire a professional product photographer. Arguably, this might be one of the biggest decisions you make for the success of your product.
Product Photography Can Make or Break You
How good your product photography almost always factors into the success of your selling that product. Most online customers, at least 75 percent, rely on the quality of product photos to make purchasing decisions.
You can make a great product to sell online. You can do good SEO to get site visitors and optimize your website for good speed. You can do good marketing to drive even more website visits but ultimately most people will judge you by the quality of the product photos. That ultimate decision to buy your product ultimately rides on how good the product looks to them. There is not optimized SEO, website speed or marketing that will change that.
Studio Product Photography Stands Apart
If you look around at successful brands that sell online, you will notice the common denominator is their product photography is almost always superior to their competitor. If their competitor is as good or better with the product photography, the market leader probably arrived at that first position having used superior product images. Replacing number one is a difficult task. But while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it’s also how you might achieve success too – do what the market leaders do.
If you find a market where all the players are using poor quality product photos, using high quality product photography alone might propel you to becoming that market’s leader. In other words, when a leading brand in a category fails to use superior quality product photography, they’ve the door open for a competitor to use superior product photography to displace them.
Settling for DIY product photography – or worst of all, product photography with your iPhone or Android phone – is the surest way of ensuring you’ll be eclipsed by a competitor.
Remember Lifestyle Photography
Most shoppers also want to see multiple product photos. And most online product marketers agree that using pure white-background photos is a good strategy, and even a current Amazon requirement. But while using such photos is a good way to put that product in the spotlight, lifestyle photos can shine a light on how the product can be used or by whom.
Lifestyle photography should also be used when possible. It basically is a type of photography where the product is shown how it might be used in real life. For example, you might sell rugged slippers that you want to sell for people to use inside and outside. So, lifestyle photography with a model would capture such photos, making it easier for potential customers to visualize that they can use your slippers just like the photos illustrate.
Your Photos Enable Originality
Many brands use stock photos in their marketing to sell products. Around 40 percent of marketers do so. There’s nothing wrong with this but it does present an additional opportunity to differentiate your brand. Studies show the importance of photography and even that stock photos are sometimes ignored.
Thus, if you have the budget for it, when taking on a project like designing your website, creating authentic photos to use for it can be a big difference with converting visitors to customers. Often, marketers will also take stock photos and Photoshop their product in. While you can get away with doing this with some viewers, to many others the Photoshop work is obvious and a letdown or turn off.
If you can avoid the use of stock photos, do so. Anytime you can create authentic high-quality images, their use provides an opportunity for differentiated marketing.
Product photography has the impression of being expensive. In addition, smartphone manufacturers would have you believe that you can use a phone to create commercial-grade product photos. This just isn’t so. When smartphone photos are compared to photos taken with a camera that has a full-frame sensor, they simply fall apart in quality.
Product photography is very important to sell a product via eCommerce. It can be argued that it’s critical. Not doing so can create a bad first impression you never recover from. Or, it can be the mistake you make to let your competitors overtake you. In creating a product and marketing it, remember that what you fail to do first, the competition will do for you to displace you. Using the highest quality product photography is one element you don’t want to miss the boat on.