Common Myths about Stock Photos and Stock Videos
“Building a business does not mean you have to do everything yourself or spend a ton of money in the beginning…let’s debunk some myths!”
It's no secret by now that using high-quality visuals helps you stand out and grab the interest of your audience. Unfortunately, it’s also no surprise there are still concerns around using stock content such as stock photos and stock video so I want to share some of the many questions I get that I can easily answer with confidence.
Let’s begin…
“I won’t feel genuine to my audience”
It’s a valid concern – and it’s great if you’ve got this concern as it shows being authentic is a really strong value for you. But when stock content is used intentionally and with thought behind them to help and serve your audience, it can help you be more relatable and authentic. Make sure that when you are speaking to your audience through stock photos or stock videos that you keep these 3 things in mind:
You Personality
Your voice
Your Uniqueness
Without these 3 then yes, stock content may not be genuine. However, if you add in the 3 key elements it will make your audience feel like you do care about what you put out into the world.
“I’ll look like everyone else!”
Your aim is to stand out, right? So using the same stock images as everyone else kind of defeats the point, right? Wrong! Don’t forget – even the biggest of niched stock photo libraries have only a few thousand members. Unless these are free stock content sites, honestly How many images of the same stock photo or video have you seen floating around? Not many right?!
Sounds like a lot but that’s a drop in the ocean when it comes to the online world. So the chances of you coming across a business using the same stock photo or video as you is slim – unless say, you follow your stock photographer on social media on a daily. And the chances that your audience will see that stock image being used anywhere else is even slimmer.
If you are still worried about that here are a couple of ways you can prevent “overuse”:
Customization- add your colors, fonts, logos, filters, and cool graphics or animations to make the image or video stand out.
Play around with the way that you use the image from cropping images to zooming in to the smallest of props.
Want to learn how to customize stock photos click here.
Bottom line – it’s highly unlikely you’ll be competing with another business using the exact same images. The online world is just too big!
“they won’t match my branding”
It’s so important as an online business owner that you stand out. One of the easiest ways to stand out visually is to look branded and cohesive on your virtual real estate. So won’t using stock photos make this harder?
Nope! It actually makes it easier. There are so many ways you can customize stock photos to help them match your brand. From cropping, flipping, and rotating to get more images out of one stock photo, to using them in branded graphics for blog posts and email headers, to overlaying pre-done edits (these are called presets) to give all your images the same style – the customization options are almost endless.
Learn how to create consistency with stock photos here
And with the right content library, curating cohesive content that works well together doesn’t have to be difficult either.
“They won’t help my business grow”
Want to know the secret to converting more of your audience into subscribers or customers? Getting their attention in the first place! You can’t do that if you don’t have high-quality content to back it up.
No matter how good your copy is, or how strong your offer is – if no one is seeing it, no one is clicking it. Your reach and traffic will increase in time with decent SEO, regular & helpful content – high-quality visuals will do so much of that hard work for you. They get you seen which in turn will get customers looking at what you have to say and then eventually buy. Your ROI (return on investment) is worth the investment in the long run.
“they’re too expensive”
When starting, growing, or maintaining an already thriving business, there will be costs involved. It’s almost impossible to avoid that. But the key is making the most cost-effective choice you can so you can increase your profits without your overheads going sky-high.
Take the SBS content membership for example… at the time of this post, it costs just 96cents per day to join. It works out around 4 Starbucks coffees a month. It’s pretty affordable when you take into account the valuable resources you can access inside.
The alternative is you either spend hundreds upon hundreds on custom photography, which will only stay fresh for a few months then you have to go back and do it all over again. But what if you don’t have time to have a photoshoot...what happens in the meantime.
Do you have money for a photo shoot and a video shoot at the same time?
Or you take them yourself and that often means you end up snapping random images on your phone to use – which looks, well messy, not cohesive, and low quality not to mention amateur. Ahhh don’t throw stones at me! Your business, quite frankly, deserves better than that.
“I can do it myself or use free stock sites”
Yep, you can certainly create your own stock photos and stock videos. You can even get free stock photos. However take into consideration the cost of doing that.
How much it will take from you in time, energy and sanity depend on a few factors:
$$$ How much you want to invest (professional equipment costs thousands)
??? How much you know about photography and videography (contrary to popular belief you can’t just pick up a camera and become a pro in a week. It took me 5 years+ of self-teaching and I’m still learning). So you are buying courses and books to learn the tricks of the trade.
!!! How much time do you want to spend searching for or creating images and videos (a typical collection of 20-30 images can take around one week from start to finish to complete to a high-end spec not to mention trying to do just 5-10 videos). Will you be able to handle that on top of your everyday life, work-life, and business life?
Can you see why it’s not always the most effective solution? Don’t get me wrong, if you enjoy photography, and like using your own images some of the time – go for it! But if the idea of having fresh content for social media every. single. day along with website imagery, blog post visuals, and email graphics have your head in a spin then a stock content library is a way to go.
A final thought…
By using stock photos from a dedicated library, your business can look high-end, visually appealing, and on-brand all the time – and it’s the most cost-effective, time-saving, and headache-busting solution for your visual content creation.