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 you’ve built your business on? Do they have a sense of what it will be like working with you?
Our brains are wired to seek connection. While commercial brands spend millions trying to get us to recognise and feel connected to symbols, we’re 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 images are often the first chance people get to see you and to form an impression of you and your business.
If you have a wider purpose than simply making sales, it’s far easier for people to understand that purpose when it comes from you, a real person, rather than a faceless brand.
More and more people want to know who’s behind the business. And not just the founder, but the people they’ll actually be working with.
Photography can be used to showcase your products, your services and your team. It can give people a behind-the-scenes look at your business, a sense of your personality and values, and an idea of what it’s like to work with you. And anecdotally, according to more than one of my clients, a good headshot can even lead to proposals of marriage.
Images have the power to capture attention and evoke emotion, making them an effective way of telling your business story and helping your brand get noticed. Photography allows you to communicate visually in ways that words alone often can’t.
Your website and social media are likely to be the main source of first impressions — impressions that can take as little as 50 milliseconds to form. That’s barely long enough to read a tagline. Strong visuals can do the heavy lifting, helping people feel something and encouraging them to stick around and 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.
Photos of you, doing what you do, help to humanise your brand. People are more likely to support businesses that use faces in their imagery. After all, people buy from people because we have a fundamental need to form and sustain relationships.
Platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn make it easier than ever to begin building those relationships. We can learn a lot about people online, what they care about, their sense of humour, how they communicate. Having images to connect with can make that first real-life meeting feel 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 a powerful tool for showing off your business, building your personal brand and creating genuine connection.
At its simplest, personal branding comes down to two things: your reputation and your visibility. Even if the term itself makes you cringe, how you show up online plays a big part in what people remember about you, and also what they say about you when you’re not in the room.
If you’ve been thinking about how photography could help show off your business and put a more human face to what you do, let’s have a chat.
