3 Steps for Choosing Your Brand’s Stock Photos
There are millions of free stock photos online for people to choose, and I imagine it can feel completely overwhelming when trying to pick the right ones for your own brand! That’s why I want to share my process of how I curate stock photos for my own brand and for clients, so that you can get helpful clarity, take action right away, and apply this to your own brand for the long-run.
Here is my 3-step process for selecting on-brand stock photos:
1. Get crystal clear on your brand values and brand theme.
Once you have really defined these, it will make the process of selecting on-brand stock photos so much faster and easier.
For example, in my own brand, I defined my top brand values as: authenticity, personal development, and freedom. From there, I decided on a brand theme of “it’s all about the journey.”
Once I had that phrase in mind, the images came rushing to my mind! I could visualize outdoor scenes, nature, desert, mountains, beach, and European cities (because as an American living abroad in Europe, this is when I first felt a real sense of freedom). I decided to pick images that conveyed a sense of roaming, wandering, and soul-searching, to go along with my brand theme and values.
2. Decide why you need stock photos and under what categories they fall.
Will your website have a blog? If so, do you plan to use images to represent each blog post, or will you use a simple text design instead?
Are you active on social media? What type of posts do you write, and how will the stock photos fit into those? For example, if you are someone who likes to write a lot of quote posts, decide whether you want a simple color background, or to spice things up with some stock photos behind the text.
What types of images are you most drawn to, and what makes the most sense for your brand? For example, you might love flatlay styled images using a desk and props, and those might be a great representation of your brand. However, if you work in an industry like yoga, for example, these types of images would not make any sense for the type of service you provide.
Consider your audience- what types of images would THEY be most drawn to? Ultimately, we want to make sure that our visuals are a powerful representation of our brand values, but also visually appealing to our ideal clients.
3. Create an inspiration board to help give creative direction for your images.
The two resources I would recommend for this step are PINTEREST and UNSPLASH, my favorite website for beautiful free stock photos. In my experience, I prefer to go straight to Unsplash because any photos you add to your inspiration board, you can immediately download them and use them on your site. Whereas if you do this on Pinterest, you are not allowed to use any of those photos for free, and you will need to find a stock photography site anyway. So, I’d say skip a step and head straight to Unplash!
You can create a new collection in Unsplash and name it “Inspiration Board” or whatever name you prefer. From there, start searching visuals that came up when you decided on your brand theme. In my example, I started to search for keywords like “journey, desert, boho, freedom, inspiration” and I would save to my collection anything that resonated with me.
It’s super easy to go down the rabbit hole collecting photos on Unsplash, so give yourself a time limit for this process. I’d recommend 30 mins- 1 hour maximum. Then, take a look at what you’ve created and decide how you want to strategically use this collection in your brand!
Go back to the photo categories you identified in the previous step, and create additional collections on Unplash as your subcategories of photos for your brand to help better organize this overall collection.
HERE’S AN EXAMPLE STOCK PHOTO COLLECTION THAT I CURATED ON UNSPLASH:
Well, there you have it. My 3-step process for curating on-brand stock photos! I hope this was helpful to you in crafting your unique voice and visuals. Comment below and let me know if this helped you in any way! :)