The right product images can do wonders for your business. While many eschew investing in the right product photography, that often ends up being a grave mistake. With so many digital businesses on the rise, how do you ensure yours stands out? Potential customers are basing their decisions solely on the visuals they are seeing since they cannot physically see your product. Without high-quality photography, a good conversion rate is near impossible. 

Great photography helps your business engage with customers better, drive more conversions, and see a higher purchase rate overall because that is what customers are basing their purchasing decisions on. A good product page has several components: 

• High-quality images
• A brief description of the product
• Further details for interested buyers 

Even within the images, they must be edited well. Having grainy photographs, or low-quality images (i.e. a lot of flash, not enough light) all reflect negatively on the overall product pages and lower your conversion rate. You want customers to feel like they know exactly what they are ordering and how it will look. While you may not be able to cover it all based on the products, keeping customer needs in mind will do a great deal in helping you develop the right images.

Here are some elements to consider when thinking about your product images and how to improve them:

Utilize audience interest 

One of the brilliant things about online businesses is that they collect enough data that allows for laser-focused targeting. And if you do not end up using this data, you will find that you are spending a lot of your budget on irrelevant images for different, disparate audiences. To fix this, the first step is to develop a buyer persona. 

This involves answering questions about your brand such as: 

• What gender they are
• What age they are
• What their profession(s) might be
• What are their interests
• What do they dislike 

Having the gender and age identified will help you with the rest of the questions, and all of these answer feedback into your product image strategy. The key is to narrow down audiences enough to where you get a high clickthrough rate and get the right level of engagement. The key is to experiment with different audience metrics and carefully observe which images to better under which audiences. This might include having action shots where the product is being used, displayed by itself, retouched and untouched, etc. What images get more interest?

Interest-based product advertising though tends to be the most powerful because it allows you to humanize your brand for better engagement while still getting the level of exposure you need to build audiences. Think about what experiences and activities your buyer personas are interested in and how your product connects. Is there something within the local area that your buyers might be interested in? Or is there a broader experience or interest, such as travel, that you can use in your photography?

Use your audience location as inspiration

Building on the previous point, narrowing down interests and location is absolutely pivotal to improving product images. It can bring about a more personal feeling, while also giving your products a more versatile edge and helping them stand out. With the right retouching and editing, these images can become a stunning way to showcase your products to local audiences. Having a balance between simple and complex photography can help your product pages look more interesting and give viewers more depth and insight into your product. Think about key local landmarks and monuments that you could use. What will feel personal enough for users to feel enticed into engagement?

These photos can be a real boost since it allows users to build a more organic connection with a brand. Coupled with a strong CTA, this can drive real traffic for your brand. Drill down to specific locations and counties for maximum impact and show how far your product reach goes. With the right edits and retouches, these photos will look high-quality and show that you invest in your product and the customer experience. There are lots of ways to strategize location so use the data your store collects to drive this. Where are shoppers located? Where do you see more traffic but fewer conversions? Having the buyer persona fully fleshed out will help guide the process greatly and reduce any irrelevant budget spending.

Personalized creativity and image selection

So now you know your audience to a tee. You know what locations you are targeting, what their interests are, age, gender, etc. So this point is all about your photos and ad campaigns. How personal are they? Are they creative and attention-grabbing? And what kind of visuals are you using? These might sound like tough questions, but this is just to get you in the right frame of mind. Ads are all about creativity, even on social media so having the right images is an absolute must for improving product pages overall.

Your creative and image selection need to be based on the following criteria:

• Audience location
• Demographics
• Interest data

The best way to personalize your campaign is with some A/B testing once you have some images. Do a mix of retouching, creative edits, and no edits to see what does better in both your product pages and your ad campaigns. Tailor visual content around the trends you are seeing to better increase conversion and uplift. For example, you could target multiple campaigns using different geographic regions, and matching your visual content to these different regions can be a serious boost. For example, if you are targeting Los Angeles, you might use a visual of LA-based on an audience interest coupled with location-specific text. Or you might use demographic data to run two campaigns: One with an image catered towards males, and another with a visual catered more towards females and run split tests to see which one performs better. Correctly chosen visuals can help engage audiences more while driving your creativity to a new level.

At Virtual Assistant Canada, we are committed to helping you create high-quality product pages that drive conversions and increase purchases. If you find that your images are holding back your business operation, why not let us help? We understand the impact that less than stellar photography can have on digital businesses and the resulting negative ROI. Leveraging our expertise in this area enables you to have a more successful business without having to worry about the details – just leave that with us and let us take care of it.