How to Brand Stock Photos

How to Brand Stock Photos

Are you making the most of stock photos?

Branding stock photos can up your image game and help you make stronger connections with your audience. It can also help improve your social posts and build more buzz around your brand — all of which are big wins for your digital marketing efforts.

Branding stock photos is simple. Here’s how to do it, plus four sites to get great free images.

The Basics of a Good Marketing Image

You can communicate a lot with visuals. But if you want to send the right message, you need to put care into choosing images that align with your brand identity and marketing objectives. Elements you should look for when selecting stock photos for your content include:

  • Quality. Images should be high-resolution, contemporary, and they should reflect the overall style of your brand.
  • Relevance. A well-chosen image should enhance the content it’s accompanying and relate in some way to its subject.
  • Branding. You’ll want to have a clear brand strategy related to image use, including rules around style, color palettes, and other notable features of your brand identity.

How to Brand Stock Photos

Branding stock photos allows you to get a custom feel to your images without custom photography. To do it well, stick with your brand colors, and consider using a filter on your stock photos to keep things cohesive.

You can also brand images with other additions, such as adding text or adding a logo. Add rules around image use to your style guide so everyone is on the same page., including guidelines around image quality, colors and content.

Where to Find Free Stock Photos

Need to keep your marketing budget in check? Consider sourcing free stock photos. Here are some good sites to check out:

  • Pixabay
  • Pexels
  • Canva
  • Unsplash

Happy photo hunting. For additional support branding your images, get in touch and let’s chat.


Why Your Brand Needs a Style Guide

Why Your Brand Needs a Style Guide

What’s the point of a brand style guide?

Style guides lay out many of the details behind your company’s marketing materials, from fonts and formatting to grammar and link use. And they’re an essential asset when it comes to keeping your brand identity consistent — especially if your team works with freelancers or contract workers.  

Here’s how to make your style guide shine, including three components it needs to have.

Benefits of a Style Guide

A style guide is an often underestimated factor in brand success. Done well, it offers major benefits to your marketing efforts, including ensuring your brand voice is always represented and taking the guesswork out of cross-channel consistency.

A style guide also helps you get ahead of many of the questions copywriters and editors may have about your preferences. That means less time and money wasted, and that’s always a good thing.

Visual vs. Editorial Considerations

Visual factors to cover include logo(s), color palettes, typography and the overall look and feel you want to achieve with your marketing materials. Editorial factors should cover things like comma use, tone, linking and words to use and avoid. You can include visual and editorial standards in a single guide, or create a separate guide for each.

Key Components of a Style Guide

Make sure to include these must-have components in your style guide:

  • Brand voice. Succinctly explain your brand voice, ethos, and tone. Keep it concise, but make sure it’s clear what you’re trying to convey with your content.

  • Formatting rules. Will headers be in the title case or the sentence case? Should sources be linked in the body copy or included as footnotes? These and other formatting rules should all be covered as needed for consistency across the board.
  • General style guidelines. Include whether you’ll be following AP style or Chicago style, so everyone knows where to look for additional guidance.

Have more style guide questions? Get in touch and let’s chat.