Great Marketing Photos Without the Price Tag

Great Marketing Photos Without the Price Tag? The Solution Is Right Under Your Thumb.

The tropes of stock photography adorn many a well-intentioned website: flannel-and-skinny-jeans-clad teenagers holding mobile devices; a serious-looking group of professionals gathered around a whiteboard; terms such as “experience” and “risk tolerance” scribbled on a Venn diagram with a hand floating in from off frame to color in the middle portion—“success”—in red dry-erase marker.

The reasons such clichéd images persist are obvious: they’re easy to scrape from sites such as Flickr or Creative Commons, and they’re free. Marketers know they need visuals to make their digital campaigns stick. According to HubSpot, consumers retain 55 percent more information when a marketing message is paired with imagery. On social media, visuals are particularly salient: tweets containing images get 150 percent more retweets than those without pictures. But with professional photographers and graphic designers often running hundreds of dollars per hour, what’s a marketer with a limited budget to do?

There’s a simple fix for creating inspired images—and it’s right under your thumb. The most valuable grassroots marketing tool you’ve been overlooking may be your smartphone camera.

Not so long ago, photos taken via flip-phone camera were grainy, pixelated blobs. Yet today, some smartphone cameras feature up to 12-megapixel resolution and can shoot in 4K. The same techniques that have made “iPhoneographers” prolific on social media and image-sharing platforms—and even in art galleries—can be adopted by marketers. Before you get snap happy with your smartphone, however, it’s important to get a handle on the basics of composition, shooting techniques, and photo editing.

Learn the ins and outs of your device’s camera as the first step in your journey to becoming an effective smartphone photographer. An iPhone 5 has different capabilities than a Google Pixel 2, and shooting on a tablet is a whole different ball game. Some device cameras come equipped with features such as depth-effect or background-blur modes, which are perfect for producing Humans of New York-style portraits. (This tactic might be a fit for, say, a clothing brand trying to grow its Instagram presence or a small business that wants to showcase behind-the-scenes profiles of employees.)

Many later-model smartphones also contain features that let users shoot in “manual” mode. This lets photographers adjust the white balance, ISO, shutter speed, etc., mimicking the results of images shot using a DSLR (a digital single-lens reflex camera). Other features of many of today’s devices include telephoto and wide-angle capabilities, which can be extremely useful for taking stunning product photos.

Getting started with mobile photography can be as easy as investing a few hours in YouTube tutorials. There are even entire blogs and online courses dedicated to the subject, such as photographer Emil Pakarklis’s iPhonePhotographySchool.com.

Pakarklis suggests some helpful tips for beginners on the iPhone Photography School blog. For example, simple, minimalist photos are often the most sharable on social; shooting from down low or getting on the same level as your subject can create an interesting angle; and leading lines—for example, a road or the gentle curve of waves lapping against sand—can direct a viewer’s eye to particular points in a photograph. These simple techniques can draw attention to your product or message.

You don’t need to spend beaucoup bucks for quality marketing images, nor do you need to fall victim to searching for “diverse millennial friend group” on Unsplash. All it takes is a smartphone, some time for learning and practicing, and a little perspective.