As a reminder this guide to Instagram Marketing for photo brands is a regular release of articles to improve your brand communication and marketing strategy. During the release of those articles, advice, best practices and study cases will be published on our website. If you haven’t read it yet, we invite you to read the first part just right here. In this part, we will talk about the pure and simple visual content.
The first impression is visual.
The overall tone and visual coherence of the feed is the first thing that catches the attention. This first overview will at first glance define who you are, how you describe yourself and how others will perceive you. Whether it’s an artist, an influencer or even a photo brand, the visual content is essential because it’s on this first impression that a person will make a first opinion, subjective of course, but a first opinion nevertheless. So you need to have an idea in advance of what you want your community to see. It can be a colorful, dynamic content, something very playful with quotes, or on the contrary something very sober and minimalist, it’s up to you! What’s great about Instagram is that you can play with your Instagram feed as a real tool. Some photo brands play with it a lot, whether to create real visual mosaics or rows of photos from the same shoot.
Everything is about quality.
No matter what visual universe you decide to adopt, improve or completely change, it’s all about image quality. Great colors, nice pictures, cool little videos… you don’t need to be a professional to achieve all that! Yes, a simple smartphone and a good light is enough to have a beautiful rendering! Moreover there are a lot of softwares and applications to improve your photos (such as VSCO, Canva, Pixlr, Snapseed or Fotor for example). Of course if you master the more developed softwares such as Photoshop you are free to play with it for an even better result. But as you are passionate about photos, it should be a piece of cake right?
A nice visual feed ok, but with which contents?
If you have a lack of inspiration in terms of content, we invite you to read our first article, entirely dedicated to this subject. Here we will go into more detail about the visuals, whether photos or videos. Thus, regarding the pure visual, you have, by being a photo brand, a wide range of choices to exploit. It can be:
A product content only (show prints, photo albums, frames…), whether or not they are put in a situation (photo or video). Don’t forget to add a shop link on your photo if you have one to encourage others to discover your products.
A repost of photos/videos of your customers. There is nothing better than sharing real reviews from your community to reassure and tempt others to discover your photo brand. Whether it’s photos directly from your customers (ask for their permission first of course) or a nice comment about his photos that he received!
More personal visuals: this is similar to our first article on content, but feel free to talk about yourself as a team too! Pictures of your vacations, your pets, moments at the office, bloopers, pictures of your photo production… creating visuals from your own photos is not forbidden!
To communicate on your offers, your photo contests or on the different moments of the year (Christmas, Halloween, Easter) by creating a unique and worked visual content.
Bouncing on the news (whether it concerns the world of photography or not): it’s always good to broaden your horizons!
Add visual coherence and dynamism to your feed. For example, create a mosaic, a series of photos or videos to put together on a single post to discover a final photo with a message, an offer or a joke, or even design a visual countdown for a special occasion.
Finally make dynamic gifs or reels, or short video montages to catch attention by surfing on the trends of the moment… but using your products! Why not create meetings with a theme around photography each week (fun facts, DIY…)?
In the next episode, we’ll cover everything you need to know for a good photo caption.
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