How photography can help build your personal brand
Are you a faceless business?
How do people experience you for the first time? Do they understand the values that you have built your business on? Do they have an idea what it will be like working with you?
Our brains are wired to seek connection. Commercial brands spend millions trying to get us to recognise and feel connected to symbols but we are pre-programmed, from infancy, to trust and connect with a face, to form and sustain relationships.
The photos on your website, the headshot on your LinkedIn profile, these pictures are most likely to b the first chance people get to see you and to form an idea about you and your business.
If you have a wider purpose than simply making sales, it is far easier to get your customers to understand that purpose when it comes from you - a real person - instead of a faceless brand.
More and more consumers want to know who the face behind the business is. And not just you as the founder but the people who work with you.
Photography can be used to showcase your products, your services, your team. It can give people a behind-the-scenes look at your business, a sense of your personality and values, alongside an idea of what it's like to work with or purchase from your business. And anecdotally, according to more than one of my clients, a good headshot can lead to proposals of marriage!
Images have the power to capture people's attention and evoke emotions, making them an effective tool for telling your business story and getting your brand noticed.
Photography enables you to visually communicate your message and showcase your brand in a way that words alone cannot.
Your website and social media are likely to be your main source for first impressions. A first impression that takes as little as 50 milliseconds. Is that even long enough for a visitor to read your tagline? Unlikely! Instead, convey emotions and the power of your brand through attention grabbing visuals. Get them to stick around and want to learn more.
Photos of you, doing what you do, can help to humanise your brand. Consumers are more likely to support brands that use faces in their imagery (people buy from people) because, as noted earlier, we have a fundamental need to form and sustain relationships.
Sites like Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn make it easy to begin to nurture business relationships. We can learn a lot about people online - their likes, their sense of humour, what they care about. Having pictures of them to relate to and build online rapport can make that first ‘real life’ meeting far less daunting.
Photos of you and your team doing what you do best can establish a connection with your potential clients before they’ve even picked up the phone!
Photography is an amazing tool for showing off your business, building your personal brand and creating connection.
Here are just a few reasons why personal branding is important for small businesses:
It helps you stand out:
Differentiate yourself and your business from the competition. A strong personal brand can help you get noticed by your potential customers and put you front of mind when it comes to needing your products and services.
It builds trust:
People are more likely to do business with individuals they trust and feel a connection with. A well-defined personal brand can help you establish that trust with your audience and help them to learn why they should choose you over your competition.
It attracts the right customers:
By clearly defining your personal brand, you can attract customers who align with your vision and mission - people who get what you do and want to learn more. This, in turn, can lead to more meaningful and profitable relationships.
It allows for flexibility:
A strong personal brand allows you to pivot and adapt your business as needed, while still staying true to your core values and message. It isn’t about cementing your identity to the brand but about showing off your values, skills and your ability to communicate those with enthusiasm and sincerity. It’s about showing off what makes you YOU and how you are making a difference!
Personal branding is a somewhat nebulous term but, in essence, it boils down to these two things - your reputation and your visibility. And even if you don’t buy into every aspect of personal branding, a strong online persona is essential for small business owners looking to establish themselves in the market and attract the right customers. It comes down to what you want people to remember about you and say about you when you’re not in the room.
By using photography to create and maintain a strong personal brand, you can differentiate yourself from the competition, build trust with your audience, and position yourself as an expert in your field.
If you’ve been thinking about how photography can help show off your business and build your personal brand this year, let’s chat and get your face out there!
