Creating and managing your brand image library is a critical part of maintaining your brand’s identity. Your Brand Identity Standard’s Guide directs the use of your logo and graphic style, but your brand image library carries your brand’s look and message even further.
Images have immense power. Images for your business are an essential element of your brand toolkit. They can positively reflect your brand, attract your ideal customers, or impact it negatively and communicate the wrong message.
The potential to win or repel is why curating images that positively represent your brand is worth the effort. Organizing and maintaining them in a system is your brand image library.
Images enable people to connect in the blink of an eye. Numerous studies have proven that images can cross language and cultural barriers that people could only hope to cross through text.
Using images that intentionally support your brand helps build trust, relay the message of your business, entertain, and inspire an audience to act. The familiar phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is still true.
Why is it Important to create and manage your brand image library?
Stay on Brand
Every business is creating content and using images to do so. As your marketing objectives change, your professional and purchased images are likely to change as well. Your organized brand image library will help your team maintain consistent branding.
Save Time
How much time is wasted searching for an image? Over time the accumulation of documents and images can be overwhelming if not stored neatly. Training new employees or sending images to your designer doesn’t have to be frustrating and chew-up time.
Access for Your Team
Keeping your image library organized is key to saving time for you and your team. Your team will know exactly where to find the image they need for social media or the website. A brand image library will also help ensure that there are no missing files because someone saved them to their computer.
Keeping it Current
As your business grows with new products and services, new campaigns and media channels will be developed. A process to maintain a consistent and contemporary look will help keep your brand from becoming stale and dated.
Sellability
What is the succession plan for your business? When you go to market, having a brand management system that includes a brand image library will add value. It goes well beyond curb appeal: it’s an essential part of an efficiently run business.
Create Categories As Pillars of Your Brand Image Library
Whether you are just starting on your branding and marketing journey, or you’ve been trekking that road for some time, you will have folders with images. If you don’t know where to start, these categories are common to most businesses.
Professional Photography
Casual Photography
Stock Photography
Graphic Design Imagery
Advertisements
Social Media
Video
Professional Photography
Most people will get to know your company before even reaching for the phone. What do people see when they come to your company’s website? Think of your website as a window into your company. Create an experience that can make your visitors feel like they’ve walked into your business and you’re greeting them with a handshake.
One of the best ways your company can provide this welcoming experience is by hiring a professional photographer to take around-the-office shots and team photos. Using stock photos to make it look like they are part of your company has become trite.
“First impressions are often virtual. How are you perceived when people see your online image?”
– Melissa Douglas
Professional Business Photographer, MelissaDouglasco.com
Professional Headshots: Introduce Your Team in the Best Light
Your headshot is your best foot forward, in print and online.
Style of Your Headshot
How do you determine the style of your headshot? The question is easier to answer when you think about how your customers expect to see you? If you’re in manufacturing or the trades, you will look more approachable in casual business attire. In the financial or legal services industry, you’ll need to appear more corporate.
Team Headshots on Your Website
Depending on the size of your company, you’ll need to decide who should be on your website. Publishing at least the leadership team gives a human connection to your company. Whether it’s three or 30 people, having a unified style on your team page creates a professional look.
Decide on a background for your team’s headshots and use it for every shot. If you think it would be great to have an outdoor background, will your weather cooperate when adding new hires?
It can be challenging to have everyone’s headshot taken by the same photographer as new employees join and others leave the team. Here’s a trick we’ve used with many clients. Create a monochromatic filter over each headshot.
Editing images with a black and white filter can pull a series of headshots from different photographers, locations, and photographers series into a cohesive theme.
Keep Your Headshot Current
Does your LinkedIn profile picture look like a much younger version of you? Your online presence is not the place for a nostalgic walk through memory lane. You’re likely to create a shock when people meet you in person.
Years fly by quickly, so to avoid this, decide when you think it’s reasonable to get headshots updated. Five years will keep people current. Sooner may be required if your eyewear or hairstyle screams a dated style.
Make a note on your calendar to schedule those headshots in five years. Sure, documenting our aging self online isn’t top-of-the-list, yet it communicates authenticity and keeps you current. Both add value to your brand.
Professional Location Photography: Attract People to Your Unique Brand
Hiring a professional photographer to capture images around the office will create a polished look. Whether you are an off-site consultant, a retail shop, or a manufacturer, professional location photography can give people an idea of what it’s like to be working with you. An unfamiliar place can hinder some people, and providing a peek inside can overcome that obstacle.
Compelling imagery invites the viewer into your business and helps them imagine what it would be like to work with you and your team. Highlighting your differentiating process, equipment, and technical expertise through imagery can be a powerful selling tool.
Exterior location shots can help people recognize your business. If your customers never come to your location and you have an impressive facility, exceptional photography will allow you to show it to the world.
Professional, high-resolution images will likely last years and are worth the investment. An experienced photographer will know how to use lighting, correct lenses, angles, and focal points to create images that put your brand in focus.
Professional Event Photography: Creating a Brand Experience in Pictures
When you’ve invested in an impressive company event, leverage it by hiring a professional photographer to capture it. There are multiple channels where event photos can later be featured, social media, website blog, and a company’s newsletter, providing an inside look for prospects and customers.
Hire a photographer who can capture the event as a brand experience. Go beyond images of team members in action, interactions with customers and guests. A seasoned photographer will capture custom-branded items, event decor, unique locations, performers and presenters, games, awards, and costumes. It will create a gallery that showcases the care and thoughtful attention given to every detail.
You’ll have captured more than brand-centric event pics. They’ll be moments your employees can enjoy and share too.
Petrous Orthodontics Grand Opening Event Collage
MRPR CPAs and Advisors – 40th Anniversary Collage
Casual Photography in Your Brand Image Library
Impromptu office pics invite people to an exclusive behind-the-scenes experience. Company social media pages are the perfect spot to share amateur photos taken at work.
Companies with a pet mascot or an open-pet policy will have difficulty resisting snapping cute photos and sharing them online. Your people can capture employee celebrations, awards, office get-togethers, and memorable impromptu moments with their phone camera for sharing.
Review your company’s social media policy and fill any gaps around sharing office pictures online. It can be a simple as following the company’s procedure for obtaining permission from all people photographed to have their image shared online.
Encourage team members to take pictures that follow your company’s mission and values, such as being fun to work with, dedicated to working for the customer, and collaborative.
Also, keep in mind that these images posted online should be of good quality. A blurry image carries a subtle message of mediocrity. Be intentional about your brand perception and keep even casual pictures professional.
Stock Photography in Your Brand Image Library
Stock photography can be the perfect solution when there is no time or budget to hire a professional photographer. Stock photography can also spark creativity, and a PSD file can be the perfect solution when edited to create a distinctive brand message.
Many stock photography resources websites offer a wide variety of images to choose from, making selecting photos fun, or for some, a chore. (Read more on the pros and cons of using stock photography, where we go more in-depth on this topic.)
One can get easily lost scrolling through thousands of images. Stay focused and note the purpose of each image you need. Where will the image be used once it is purchased? Remeber to reference your company’s brand imageboard (see below) to stay on brand.
Stock Photography Warnings
Stock Photography WarningsUsing stock photography entirely to portray your company can come off as inauthentic. People can tell. Still, there are times when a stock image is precisely what you need.
Strategically placed and rarely used, stock images can support your message. Too many, and your brand looks fake.
When using stock imagery, you also run the risk that someone has seen it elsewhere, or worse, it’s on your competition’s website. You may find it easier to avoid this by purchasing images on more exclusive sites or by selecting costlier images in their designer series.
It should not need to be said, but we’ll say it: always purchase the license and never use imagery for which you do not have permission. Every artist deserves to receive credit and value for their work.
Graphic Design Imagery
Showing your potential customers what you do rather than telling them can make a huge impact. If you’ve created graphics of your process or ways to use your product, these may be less likely to become dated quickly. If so, you can organize them in folders by product, purpose, or placement.
Ads and Social Posts
Determine how you will be using images in print, digital, and social ads. It may make the most sense to organize them in folders by media channel, or by campaign and date.
We have found that the best system that works is to organize ads according to the vendor or media channel. Each vendor has a folder with dated folders within. Published ads are added to the folder corresponding to the date it was published.
Social Posts can be managed in a similar way, especially if you are concentrating on specific social channels. Dating when images are used in social posts and noting the purpose for which they were used will make keeping your message fresh and aligned with your brand. We’ve added some tips to help you do this in our 7 Top Tips, at the end of this post.
Video
Depending on the amount of video you are creating–even a relatively small amount–your video library could become a menagerie in a short amount of time. Your marketing team can repurpose video for various channels, and you’ll need to be able to access it, edit it, and repost it. An organized video library will include a system for naming files and folders for organizing them. Here’s an example of a folder structure for a video library below:
- Final Published Videos
- Company Promos
- Explainer Videos
- Team Bios Videos
- Product Videos
- Event Videos
- Employee Training Videos
- Social media Videos
- Casual – Phone Videos
- Video Assets
- Archived Drafts
- B roll
- Evergreen Clips
- Stock Video
- Purchased Stock Video
- Previews Stock Video
Every published video will ideally also have a custom thumbnail that replaces the video still options that your media channel offers. Decide whether you’ll have a separate folder for these or keep them with each published video.
Three Easy Steps to Creating a Brand Imageboard
Creating a Brand Imageboard is a fun way to capture a style for your brand. You don’t need it to be complicated, so keeping it simple is a smart way to go.
Review your company’s existing photographs and select those that present your brand in the best light.
Create an imageboard with your images. You can create this in a design program or use a site like Pinterest. Presentation software would work for this too.
If you need to expand the range, pop over to a stock photography site. On most stock photography sites, you can download previews with watermarks.
Download as many as it takes to create a spectrum of images that play well with your brand colors and reflect your brand. If you want to publish it for internal use with your design team, purchase the stock images you’ll be using.
Display your brand imageboard and have your team reference it as a guide for future images added to your brand image library.
7 Tips to Creating and Managing Your Brand Image Library
1. Location
Decide on a central location for all of your images. This can be on any platform that your company is comfortable using, like Google Drive or Dropbox. There are also cloud-based solutions designed to help you manage your brand image library, like File Camp.
2. Structure
Create folders for what you know you’ll use. You’ll need these for the next step. (Reference the list above)
3. Audit
Audit of what you currently have. As you’re sorting through digital files, you’ll be able to sort the images you want to keep into the folders you’ve set up.
Has anyone been keeping images in a place that no one has access to, like their laptop?
4. Declutter
Archive images that you no longer need: don’t throw them away. You may need to reference an image in the future. It may also be great to have down the road for a “Throwback Thursday” post.
5. Label
Label every image clearly and consistently. Cloud-based solutions will guide you and offer options like folders, collections, and galleries.
Labels make images searchable. Decide with your team how you will search for images. Outlining a format will make it consistent for everyone to use.
For example: CATEGORY, PEOPLE, DATE
- Client Appreciation Dinner, Sales leaders, 5-2021
- Office, Jim Smith, Cathay Bayder, Jan Deiwer, 2-2021
- Stock, Couple at restaurant, 8-2020
Labeling Purchased Stock Images can have keywords that people might search. The more information that you attach to a particular photo will make it easier to find in the future.
6. Originals
Maintain original images. When images are used in marketing collateral or altered, make copies and move those to the project folder. This will avoid confusion when looking for the original and keep your folders uncluttered.
You may want to add the marketing piece (brochure, mailer) or where it was used (Social, Digital Ad) to the label.
For example: CATEGORY, PEOPLE, DATE, USE
- Office, Tom Maden, Sue Juthin, Vivian Lent, 8-2021, Webinar Promo
- Stock, Couple at restaurant, 8-2020, GAd, Social Ad-FB, LI, 9-2021
7. Protect
Make sure you are backing up your images! Talk with your IT specialist about best practices for secure digital storage.
You can also protect your ideas by adding your logo to everything you publish online. It’s one of our most common uses for the “knock-out” or monogram logo file. If a careless individual desired to use your image, they would have to edit out your logo first.
TIP: Make It Yours
TIP: Make It YoursAdd your logo to images posted on social media. This is especially important if they are custom graphics or proprietary products.
As your business grows and you increase marketing channels, the number of images used to build your brand will expand your content library. Creating and maintaining a brand image library with a storage system and guidelines will streamline how you create content that attracts your ideal customer. Your team will appreciate how easy it is to locate what they need, and you’ll be winning the important battle of maintaining an aesthetically cohesive and remarkable brand.
What is working in your brand image library? Share your tips in the comments below!
Shout out to Melissa Douglas Co, Brand Photographer, on an outstanding Identity Creative photoshoot.
