What do you want your customers to look at?

What do you want your customers to look at?

Four Uses of Professional Photography on Your Business Website

Website visitors tend to back away from web pages stuffed full of solid text. These pages are impossible to scan and require that you commit yourself to a long session of painstaking reading. They are unappealing because a page-full of alphanumeric characters fails to stimulate the visual part of the brain. Vision is a primary way that humans experience the world. In order to provide a good user experience, your website must accommodate this basic human need for visual stimulation. This is why it’s common practice to break up text with images.

However, breaking up text is just one of many ways you can put images to good use. Through the use of professional photography, you can enhance your website in other more powerful ways:

Use Images to Make Your Visitors Feel Your Product’s Benefits

The old marketing phrase that you should sell the sizzle, not the steak refers to the importance of selling the benefits of a product rather than its features. Benefits appeal to the emotions, which motivate people to buy. The intellect is later used to justify a purchasing decision. In addition to writing text that explicitly describes a product’s benefit, including the right image will evoke the emotions associated with this benefit. This text and image combination is highly effective at inducing the viewer to imagine himself experiencing this benefit.

Use Images To “Back up” Your Statements

The phrase that seeing is believing seems to hold when an image accompanies an assertion. Research shows that a statement is more likely to be judged as true when it’s accompanied by an image. In fact, this effect is present even when the image isn’t relevant to the statement.

When making an important claim about your product, including a photo of a test demonstrating the claim, or of the product in action, or of an individual who benefited from this claim will increase the assertion’s credibility in the mind of the viewer.

Use Images to Direct the Viewer’s Gaze

Lead generation forms, newsletter list sign-up forms, and purchase buttons are the most important elements of a landing page. If viewers have difficulty noticing them, conversion rates will plummet. Their positioning on the page, color, and design all affect their prominence. To ensure that they get the viewer’s notice, use an image that directs the eye straight to these elements. One of the simplest images is an arrow. Provided it isn’t too large and garish looking, an arrow will do the job.

A more effective way of directing the viewer’s gaze is using an image of a person looking at the sign-up form or purchase button. People naturally follow the gaze of a person just as readily as they would follow an arrow. However, unlike an arrow, a human face is always the first thing noticed when landing on a web page. All of us are wired to give a human face our first notice. This effect, plus the tendency to follow a person’s gaze virtually guarantee that the viewer’s eye will see your form or button.

Use Detailed Images to Display E-Commerce Products

One disadvantage of online shopping is not being able to handle and view the merchandise. Providing multiple detailed views of your products serves to compensate for this. Amazon.com does exactly this, and also allows you to zoom in on each product view to see the product’s texture.

Bella Bride Jewelry product photography by Miceli Productions

For example, when viewing sports shoes on this site, you can even view the shoe tread pattern. The images are so good that you can almost smell the rubber soles. There is an additional benefit to using this kind of detailed and high quality product images. High quality images of any product create an impression of high product quality in the mind of the viewer.

Interested in trying these suggestions on your website? Miceli Productions commercial photography can take the quality images you need. Contact us today.