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Image and Photograph Tips
Posted by Karl | Posted in photos | Posted on 18-05-2012
You want to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to extracting all the sales juice from your marketing budget.
A picture paints a thousand words and there is no doubt that using pictures has a direct and positive impact on the sales success of marketing tools such as catalogs, newsletters, brochures or company magazines.
Creating good-looking and successful collateral is time-consuming and expensive if you are going to do the job right – it also takes time not only for a piece of work but for your overall repertoire of tools you will develop and use.
Catalogs for instance, are very heavy users of photos – and this is where customer seek to cut corners first and save money – this is where a catalog will either succeed and return profits or fail completely and lose the investment. Do not scrimp on the photographs – take single product shots where possible and make the images as large as you can in the catalog – both directly increase sales.
You can save money by using images from your supplier or manufacturer – frequently these are excellent images for you to use, so always make sure you ask them if they have images you can use in your own publications. You not only want the images but you want them in the format your design partner can work with – for instance, images with clipping paths may be required; if they don’t have them you may end up with a higher design and preparation cost which loses you the money you save with a “free” image – act as liason between the design partner and the suppliers so everyone knows exactly what is required.
Many customers are web-based companies who grew from a web-site and have continued right on growing so there is little to say where the “traditional” part of the business begins and the “web” business ends. Frequently they have a stack of images which are used on the web but there are problems with low-resolution and these images simply cannot be used in a print-catalog – the end result will be blurred and there are also issues in handling them causing increased design team costs.
Clients also look to save money by taking the photographs themselves – a false economy on several levels. Firstly, the cost of the shoot is about 30-35% of the image budget but is 100% important when it comes to the finished quality. You simply cannot afford to end up with a set of bad product images and taking the shots is where the risk lies – hire a professional volume image provider and get the shots you really will need and the design team can use.
