Using Images to Brand Your Business

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Crafting a Distinct Brand Image

Once you have an idea of what your brand story is and you have the color, font, and logo components to match it, it’s time to start thinking about another key element in your business’s visual identity: brand images. 

Whether you’re selling services or products (or both), you’ll need to source some quality images of your business’s offerings to put on all of your online content platforms. We’ll show you how to get started using some free, generic images that help us determine the aesthetic we want for our imaginary barbershop’s website. Later down the line, though, we’ll go into more detail about how to source these images yourself.

Using Images to Brand Your Business – Transcript

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a larger course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. If that sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe. 

While it's important to consider all of the content platforms that you'll need to fill in order to effectively market a company, in this video, we’ll only focus on sourcing some product images and lifestyle images to be able to use as we build out the website for our imaginary barbershop in our next section of the course. 

First, I'll need to assess how many pieces of content I'll need. If you're going to be creating content yourself or paying to have content created, you may want to really drill down into the specifics of what you need. But since I know I'll be sourcing these images free and quickly from the web, I'm just going to briefly think about what pages that I'm going to build on my website, which I'll be covering later in the course. In this video, I'll estimate how many pieces of content I need for each page. I'm going to estimate that I'll need about 25 images to get our site up and running. 

Next, I'll consider how these images need to be branded. To do this, I'll start by Googling barbershop photography and get an understanding of what our customers and audience would expect to see when interacting with a barbershop brand. This will help me ensure that the world that I'm building for the audience feels familiar to them. It's interesting to see how many of these photos are black and white. The first time I Googled this, I had to make sure that I hadn't somehow ended up searching for black and white barbershop photos. 

Given that so many of these photos are black and white – and that “modern,” “polished,” and “clean” are three of our brand adjectives that would align with the colors black and white – we may want to consider black-and-white content for our brand as well. I'm also noticing that, as you'd expect, there are a lot of pictures of men getting haircuts, barber chairs, barber tools, and pictures that show off barbershops. I'll save a few of these photos on my desktop to put into a mood board later on down the road. 

Now that we have an understanding of what our audience will expect when walking into our brand, we'll consider how we can make the world that we're building feel unique to our brand, specifically by adding a signature to our content. I noticed that the first photo that pops up appears black and white at first, but it's actually just deeply desaturated. This left the barber pole in the picture looking deep brown, similar to our main brand color. This picture looks great and made me consider using black-and-white content, but I could allow our main brand color to break that rule whenever it's appropriate. This would let our audience know that if they're looking at a black-and-white barber photo that only allows for one deep brown color to show through, that they're likely looking at a photo of North End Barbershop of Bloomington. I'll be sure to add this photo to our mood board. 

So that gives you a brief illustration of how to make creative ideas surrounding your brand's content. There's obviously lots more options to consider, and there's thousands of creative style choices that you could continue to make for your brand. Start by making a few choices and write them down, and continue to make defined style choices as you continue to work on your brand standards. Do this for the duration of time that you market the brand. 

Lastly, I'll need to source some photos for the website. Now, if I was going to market a real barbershop, I’d likely ensure that I set aside a budget or had the skills to do a real photo shoot. I'd want to make sure that I do a real shoot so that I can show off the shop and the actual barber experience to any potential customers. But since this is an imaginary shop, I'm going to head over to Pexels.com and see if I can source images for the imaginary shop there. 

I’ll search for “barbershop,” and after a quick scroll, I can see that there are a lot of beautiful images created by Thgusstavo Santana. Many of the images feature a burnt orange color that I can easily Photoshop to match our deep brown main brand color. Since there's a large body of work by one photographer and each of these images fit with our signature style, I'll go ahead and download all of these photos. Next, I'll Photoshop them so that they fit the signature style that we outlined earlier in this video. And finally, I'll save them so that I can use them to upload to our website in the next section of the course. 

Lastly, I'll need to source some product images. Again, if we were marketing a real barber shop, I'd likely need to ensure that I was provided product images by our vendor, or I'd need to take my own product photography. But since we're marketing a pretend barber shop, I'll just be using some product photos of some men's hair products that you can get at your local grocery store. Since I won't actually be selling these products, I'm going to use their product images to build out this fake website and fictionally portray these products as the ones that my barber shop would sell. I'll be sure to save each of these images and keep them close by so I have them when we're ready to prepare them for our website. 

And there you go. We have a base of images that we can use when we create our website in the next section of the course. 

And with that, we finally finished the branding section of this course. We've touched on how to make good decisions surrounding the name of your organization, your URL, your colors, your fonts, your logos, and your photos and videos. And hopefully, you've been following along and now have well-thought-out and easily communicated brand standards to guide your creative choices as you sell your products and services. You'll need these standards put together as we prepare for the next video, where we'll finally begin putting content on that website that you purchased earlier in the course. We're excited to see you in the next section of the course as we begin building our website. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that gives business owners all of the essential information to start and operate their business. We've provided a link where you can get access to all of the free and discounted business tools we mentioned in this course below this video. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next section of the course, and if you have any questions, let us know.