Whether it is in your job description or not, everyone loves to have fun with marketing. Every day hundreds of new apps and websites appear that can assist you in your efforts to be seen and heard by your prospects and customers. One may wonder, what has happened to the photography profession now that there are over 107 million smart phone users in the United States, which now makes it easy to take great photos for use in social media and marketing campaigns. Even the android devices have special lens attachments which enable you to take photos with different perspectives like a close up shot or fisheye panoramic view. The image used on this blog is a free stock image taken by Ryan McGuire from the website Gratisography.
Graphics designers and marketing professionals all train hard to stay current on the most recent marketing trends, but it seems many of their skills are being replaced by the use of apps and other online user-friendly platforms. These services, however, do not replace the valuable consulting you receive from the marketing support companies you have relationships with. Out of curiosity, I tested out some of the online services and found that they lacked depth of understanding on what the vision was for the marketing task, they didn’t have workable knowledge on the product/service itself and lacked overall industry intelligence. This made me conclude that it is a hit or miss process in utilizing these services. With a lot of misses you lose valuable time, and get no value added to the marketing task you are focusing on. It is like the popular adage, “you get what you pay for.”
As a marketing professional, there are genuine concerns that these apps and online services will unfavorably influence my ability to maintain existing clients and attract new clients. However, in evaluating the benefits of the marketing professional relationship, it is clear there are many reasons why the new do it yourself marketing tools, will never replace the benefits of having a company who knows your business provide relevant marketing services. Some of the reasons follow:
• Better able to evaluate major marketing decisions given their history with the business and understanding of the industry.
• Face-to-face interaction and client meeting and brainstorming sessions help develop successful marketing plans and new ideas for growth.
• There are better controls in place for meeting client deadlines on marketing projects.
• The consulting part of the relationship can at times provide the greatest value as you can call your marketing professional on any and all marketing questions, ideas and pending projects.
• The work provided by marketing professionals is more customized which helps in the branding and overall image development.
• The creativity of some of the apps and services is limited, so you may not be able to achieve the overall visual you want. Additionally, the learning curve requires time to understand all the capabilities of the tools available.
• You may not be satisfied with the quality of the work provided and decide not to use it.
We recognize there are many opportunities for companies to save money by using these services, so we don’t hesitate to provide useful tools that can be of assistance. Sometimes a client may need a certain photo as soon as possible, and hiring a photographer may take too long and would require a sizable shooting fee. In these cases, we recommend they search through online photography sites that offer free stock photos which can be downloaded for corporate use. Some of our favorite sites we have used a lot for high resolution photos follow. The last site on the list, is a search engine for finding free photos, so that site may save you a lot of added searching time.
Pixabay: High quality stock images.
Morgue File: Thousands of free reference images and illustrations.
Negative Space: This site has hundreds of selections across a dozen or so categories.
SplitShire: SplitShire is the work of a single photographer: Daniel Nanescu. His photos are sorted into a dozen categories, but you’ll rarely find two that are anything alike. Every image is unique and have magazine like quality.
Gratisography: Gratisography is the work of single photographer Ryan McGuire. His shots have a very unique quality and polarizing style to them.
Life of Pix: Life of Pix is a collection of works provided by the Advertising Agency in Montreal’s network of photographers. In the hundreds of stunning/award-winning quality photos available, most of them involve nature and city scenes.
FreeStocks: FreeStocks is a small collection — only about one to two hundred photos in all — but they are useful for blogs, magazines, and social media.
IM Free: IM Free is a curated collection of images sorted into a dozen different categories, but mainly useful for cityscape, nature, and people photos.
Pexels: Stock free photos in 20 different categories. Every StockEvery Stock is a cool site that is a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific.
When you visit the sites they indicate their use policies, but most are unrestrictive and allow commercial use. All the sites also have search windows, making it easier to find the perfect photo. We use dozens of photo websites when searching for photos for brochures, websites, and marketing collateral, and find all the ones on this list to be quality sites.
In our next blog post, we will focus on available free creative marketing tools that enable you to create unique marketing documents online with very little training. Creating attention getting content is critical in getting higher online engagement, so utilizing the tools available will help give you an edge in your marketing programs.
