Every picture tells a thousand words, right? This week I share how using an image-led approach for your media strategy can be a game-changer for you. Why? I started my career as a photojournalist from Essex, UK, in the early 1990s, mostly working with music mags and creative portfolios before I trained in public relations and never looked back.

Here’s the thing, one of my first proper PR jobs was as a global PR manager for a technology consulting company, and I had some very technical topics to talk about let me tell you!

But, because of my background, I knew how important a good image was to getting featured in the media or not. Even if that was a bought stock image that represents the context of what I was talking about. I made sure that every press release or media pitch had an image after that. And guess what? It works.

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**When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. (Brain Rules via Hubspot visual content stats April 2021)

Full Transcript

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works, with me, Emma Drake. Hi Everyone. How are we all doing today? I hope everyone is okay today. Those of you who have listened to the podcast for a while now will know this, but just in case you’ve just tuned in today, I’m an in-house communication strategy expert, turned external advisor of businesses. And, I’ve worked with many types of businesses, but I love to work with businesses that are funded to grow and have ambitious plans to be bigger companies one day. I’m making it my mission to help you break down some of those big topics in communicating about your business. And help you work out, how to implement these things into your businesses. And, you can create value. You can build trust. And it will save you time, money, and energy. This week, I wanted to talk to you about using an image led strategy for your business. And, one area where using the right images can be a game changer for you.

If you follow me on social media, you will know this already. But I started off my life as a photo journalist, my working life should I say, as a photo journalist from Essex in the UK, in the early nineties. I was mostly working with music magazines and creative portfolios, dancers, etc. And, this was before I trained in public relations and I never looked back. But here’s the thing, in my first proper PR job, I was global PR manager for a technology consulting company. And, I had some very technical topics to talk about, let me tell you. But because of my background, I knew how important a good image was to getting featured in the media or not, for example. Even if that was a bought stock image of an uptick in stocks in a share story, or sending a headshot, obviously it had to be professionally taken. Or an image that just represented the context of what I was talking about.

I made sure that every press release or media pitch had a good quality image or two, and guess what? It worked. I’ve been that person pitching images to magazines. And, I know what they’re looking for. There was also some recent research by social media and content marketing platform, HubSpot, which revealed that when people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if there’s a relevant image paired with that same information, people retain 65% of the information three days later. So, how good is that for getting your message across? It’s unsurprising, but a powerful stat, isn’t it? As the saying goes, every picture tells a thousand words. So, today I’m focusing on how to make sure you stand the best chances of getting your product or story placed in the media, using great images.

If you have good quality images, there are multiple opportunities that you can have and access to publications, that you just don’t have with copy or words. But there are some rules. I’m going to cover sending images to accompany your news release, but also pitching a visual story and working with picture desks as part of your strategy. As well as tips on format and sharing. So let’s dive in.

Now, a couple of things before we get started. From a consumer product media and trade media point of view, a good image is non-negotiable. If you send a pitch without one, it simply will not get looked at in the same way or tool. Journalist get thousands of emails every day. And a photo can be part of the filtering system, because of what I said previously about what they add to a story. Journalists know that they add this to the story and it’s their job to make it the best possible story it can be, for the publication they’re working for and for their readers. It’s worth researching the publication you want to be in as they will have a certain style, most likely. So as part of your strategic approach, you need to be working, where do we want to be pitched to?

Where do we want to appear in? And actually, what’s their style? What are they going to be looking for? For example, if you’re an interior designer or a company that sells high quality interior products, those images need to reflect your style and the magazine style and be really high quality with that styling. If pitching to someone like DZ in a wallpaper, for example, you just will not get through the door unless they are extremely high quality. And they’re showing some sort of edge or trend or flare.

This leads us to picture desks. So these are usually part of national newspapers and major magazines, et cetera. They look for what they call page holders. This is something that can hold the reader’s eye before engaging them in reading the story. And they want to make sure they’re not going to turn the page so the image is part of making sure that they actually go on to read the story.

So you and I will look and we’ll go, “Great image” and we’ll look two or three lines down, straight away. And it means we’re not skipping past and turning the page. So now you’re thinking, right, I am sending an image with every press release. Okay. So stop. There are some rules to follow and make sure you don’t tick off the journalists by sending them the wrong way or sending the wrong images and you want to make sure you stand the best chance of those images standing out if it’s part of your strategy. So here’s a few tips that you can follow to make sure you get it right.

Make sure the images are high resolution. So without getting too technical, that’s something called 300 DPI for print and 175 DPI for website or online. But you can look this up, but just make sure they’re the right resolution or ask. Make sure they’re not staged. So lifestyle photos can often look staged. If you think about that real estate brochure with the happy couple on the front cover, drinking cappuccinos and laughing, you’ll get an idea of what I mean. Okay. They need to be authentic.

Format is super important. So always send the right format. There are formats that journalists like, and they don’t like. If it’s for print, you need to be sending the right format. So check out what that is. It will either be a .JPG or a .TIFF or TIF file for print sometimes. The number of images is important and choice is good, but make sure you have not overwhelmed the journalist. The picture desk in particular does not have time to wade through all of your glorious images, as good as they may be. You need to be doing the work for them and picking your best one to three that are perfect and make sure they’re captioned and credited to the right persons. If that’s you or the photographer or the source of the photography, if it’s stock photography, for example.

That leads us onto always capture new images. This helps tell the story. And I work on the basis of a short sentence with a longer description. As if it’s a photo story, you need to explain briefly what’s happening in that photo and why it matters to the reader. So don’t assume a level of knowledge, especially with niche publications, and also with a good image and a strong caption, even if there’s no room for your press release, you stand a really good chance of them running the image if you run a really good caption with it. And this is my photo journalism days, you need to really think about that and give them options to use your image and copy in different ways.

It probably goes without saying that you should not use images without permission, but I’m going to say it anyway, or anything that you borrowed from the internet, that’s a real no-go. They need to be original images or bought stock photography and share a link to an online newsroom or folder. Personally, I use Dropbox that’s clearly labeled and easy for them to download from. Avoid sending large files goes without saying, but make sure that your opening sentence says there’s some great images or the title if you’re pitching to a picture desk.

So this moves us neatly onto pitching to a picture desk. This is a whole different ball game. Albeit the list of tips I already covered still apply actually. So any publication big enough to have a picture desk will be really, really super picky and get thousands of images sent to them every day. When pitching images, you need to be really clear and timely with what you’re providing. I’ve been in a situation where a client has promised the photos and then they haven’t delivered. So I’ve been the one left saying sorry. And you know, someone just quickly just takes your spot for that photo slot in the publication. Original photography is also a must with most media, especially for product images. However good stock photography does work and is acceptable and it’s worth purchasing some good images for your story if you have none.

This moves us on to commissioning or sourcing your images. Now there are various reach you can take with this. But the main thing is to be sure that they are authentic and represent your brand effectively. You can also source images from Instagram, though for use images and news media like this in particular, as you can credit the source. I’ve done this really successfully with client blogs actually, but also sometimes the excellent quality is just what the platform is all about.

Ideally, you will have original product photography if you’re a product led business with a mix of maybe some of customer photography in there as well, but illustrations can also be a great way of having original content commission. So, sketches of your products, this works really well in the built environment actually where something is emerging or isn’t quite there yet or built. And sketches can be a really good way of getting that cross. If you are commissioning photography, the weather and lighting plays a huge part in there. So try not to overbalance shots or use filters, they need to be super high quality, super crisp, and it’s worth waiting for the right day to shoot outside, it will be the better in the long run for sure.

So finally, I get back to my original point that an image led PR strategy can be a great thing, but it needs to be planned and executed in a detailed way with the right approach. So hopefully today you’ve learned a few things about how to use images as part of your media approach, a media strategy, and also how important images are for generally telling your brand story. You’ve also learned a bit about pitching images and how, and when to use good quality images. Every picture tells a thousand words. So why not let pictures do your storytelling.

Before you go, I wanted to quickly tell you about something really exciting, a new service of mine, which is an online training and resources platform that I’m building. If you’re listening to this podcast, you can register your interest to be first to hear about it. It’s going to have play on demand learning, access to group workshops. You can learn about many of the topics I talk about on this podcast, as well as templates and systems to download, if you just need a quick fix. I’d love you to be with me on this journey and also let me know what your big challenges are that I can help you with. So the link to register your interest is in the show notes to make sure that you first hear about it. And if you’re already in my email community, you get access to my latest offers, free downloads, as well as more ideas and advice you can implement.

So finally, thank you for listening to this episode of Communication Strategy That Works. Don’t forget to check my show notes for those links that I mentioned, and I’d really love it if you would subscribe to my podcast and leave me a review. And also, if you think there’s someone that could benefit from listening to this podcast, please share this within your networks. So I’ll just say bye for now and see you next time.