Find the most effective images for your adverts and deliver a clear message to your audience with our quick and easy checklist!
Images can be a really great marketing tool, so it’s really important to make sure you choose the right picture for your audience. We’ve chosen 7 key things for you to think about when you’re picking images for your advertising campaigns to help you reach your audience in the best way…
- Pick an image with a focal point
When you’re picking an image, you need to look for something that catches people’s eyes and draws them in. Choosing an image with a clear focal point is a great way to get your audience’s attention, but be sure to pick a fairly simple image that isn’t so powerful it detracts people from your message!
A simple, clean image with one focus point is enough to do the job, which ties in well with our next pointer…
- Look for copy space
Copy space on an image means you can not only visually appeal to your audience, but you can add your message straight to the image. The perfect image for adding copy needs to be simplistic – the simpler the image, the crisper and clearer your message will appear.
We know it isn’t always easy to find images with copy space, so we’ve packed a lightbox full of images that are copy-ready for a whole range of projects! Check it out now >
- Use relevant, on-trend imagery
Keeping your images up to date and in line with the latest image trends is a great way of showing your audience you know what’s ‘in’ right now. Giving the images in your ads a refresh is one thing, but switching up the images to fit in with the most prominent trends will help you keep your audience engaged.
To help you out, we’ve already created a little something to make it easy for you to discover what images are trending right now. Head over to our January 2017 Image Trends report >
UK Trend: Lifestyle – see more lifestyle images in our lightbox >
- Include something your audience will respond to
The images you use in your ads will need to make sense to your audience – this will help them engage with your advert and should also help them identify what you’re advertising. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try a new approach to advertising, but just that you should keep your image choices relevant to a) what your audience are interested in or b) your brand or product, so your audience knows you’re behind the campaign!
- Choose the right colours
Depending on your project, your audience might be receptive to certain colours – whether they respond to your brand colours or are on the look-out for on-trend colours in your ads.
There are loads of great blogs and articles online that’ll help you discover the best colours to reach out to your audience with, and once you’ve picked the colour you need, you can start searching our collection using our handy colour filter! All you need to do is grab the image’s 6-digit , click our ‘Image’ search filter and pop the code in the ‘Color’ box. Then just add your search terms in the search bar and hit search!
Popular colours will depend on the audience you’re trying to reach, but one great example of an on-trend colour for 2017 is ‘Greenery’, which is this year’s ‘Pantone colour of the year’. Check out our blog for some greenery inspiration >
- Use the largest image file size and resolution
Make sure you choose an image that has the right capabilities to be used in your project. It’s recommended that you buy the largest image size and resolution available so you know you’re getting the image at its maximum capabilities, even if you’re working on a small-scale advertising campaign.
You can always scale down an image and make it smaller without affecting the quality, but if you try to upscale a small or low-res image and make it larger, it’ll lose quality and become pixelated. For help with file sizes, check out our handy infographic on our help page or read our blog on ‘choosing the right file sizes for your project’.
- Think about vectors
For larger scale projects like a billboard ad or a graphic design project with lots of editing involved, a vector file could be the perfect option for you.  Vectors are infinitely resizable and, unlike other file types, the image quality won’t be affected by resizing. What’s more, they’re made up of a series of shapes that each sit on separate layers, all of which can be edited individually!
Want to learn more about vector files and where to find them? Check out our handy blog posts: How to search for vectors on 17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß and What are vector graphics.
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