Be Honest: What Did You Notice First? The Burger or This Title?

A picture is worth a thousand words. If this time-told idiom holds true, shouldn’t you be paying closer attention to every photo displayed on your website? The right imagery can make the difference between a consumer picking up your product or passing it by in favor of one of your competitors.

When you promote your products online, it’s often the first impression that can make or break your chances for success.

The first impressions consumers have about your offering are important, and because you’ll only get one chance to make this first impression, it’d better be a good one.

The quickest way to lose your customers is to poorly represent your product by not treating its online presence the same way that you would for displays at brick-and-mortar grocery stores.

It’s a bit of mystery why some brands fail to fully utilize the capabilities of a website to sell or promote their products online. When there’s no physical product for users to handle, the images on a website have to work even harder to convey the true look and feel of a given product. To this end, it’s imperative to use high- quality photographs in order to help make sales. These photographs play a vital role for consumers as they judge the quality of your products.

The importance of quality shots can’t be stressed enough, and it’s an investment worth making—conversions have been known to more than double through improved imagery.

To develop the proper imagery for your product set, be sure that your images are professionally photographed and that the digital versions are of sufficient resolution. Ideally, you want customers to think about your product in terms of the potential experience they could have with it.

You want consumers to taste the product, to feel its texture, to imagine its smells, and to think about what it would be like to feel the warmth from that cup of coffee or the juices from a bite of that cheeseburger as they swirl around their palates.

Put as much care and thought into the online product imagery as you would into a store display.

You wouldn’t shrink the size of your in-store product to the size of a quarter, so don’t do it to your online product.

Whether viewers are on your home page or on a page specific to the product, providing clear, attractive pictures will help convert consumers into customers.

It’s also a good idea to place your products in the proper context. For example, if your product is typically a complement to a larger dinner presentation, it could be shown as part of a family dinner, as part of a collection of tasty recipe ingredients, or as part of a large dinner party menu.

Placing your products in an environment where consumers would typically interact with them allows the buyer to visualize the product as their own, and this can get them to actually go out and make the product their own. The photos should also serve as a means to answer objective questions about the offering: How big is it? How is it used? How should it be prepared or consumed? Answering as many potential consumer questions upfront not only makes your job easier, it prevents customers from having doubts about an item and then forgetting about it altogether.

Persuasive imagery is a powerful tool that any brand can use to increase its product sales. Poor imagery is detrimental to sales and brand perception. Good quality imagery, however, will get consumers away from their computers and into the stores in search of your products.