Are you using stock photos on your website?
All of us in the web design industry have been guilty of using stock photos. They are the “fast food” of marketing: easy to find and a quick fix. But just like fast food, stock photos can be very detrimental to your online visibility and the health of your brand.
I’m gonna walk you through 3 reasons why you should leave stock photos alone, but before I do…
Has your agency Niche down yet? Do you know which Niches are hot and which ones are evergreen? And how does Niche selection impact income & margins?
And now onto why you should ditch stock photos:
In the B2B world, we sometimes forget that it isn’t a business selling to another business, it is a real person pitching another real person. And what drives people to make business decisions?
(Sidebar: You are fooling yourself if you believe that your clients are carefully weighing all their options and coming to logical decisions. You are selling Captain Kirk not Mr. Spock!)
Emotions drive business decisions, trust is one of the most powerful emotions, and people do not trust stock photos.
Near Media did a study of how consumers feel about stock photos and here are their results:
But why don’t people trust stock photos? Great question which leads us to…
I have owned a marketing company for over 15 years and one of the earliest lessons I learned was to not swim against the current of human nature.
It can be tempting to do so when logic illuminates a potential shortcut but there are no shortcuts to human nature. Over thousands of years, human nature is undefeated versus logic.
Here’s another study from Duke University that William Poundstone writes about in his classic text on pricing, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). In the study, the researchers wanted to see if they could boost the sale of a beer brand competing against a 2nd brand by offering a 3rd “decoy” brand.
Trust human nature. And trust is human nature.
Years ago the Nielsen Norman Group did an eye tracking study.
In the image on the left, the company has employee biographies AND a photo of the employee. Users spent 10% more time looking at photos even though the biographies took up 3x more space.
But on the right, this generic looking photo was COMPLETELY ignored by users!
Your prospective clients want (dare I say, demand) authentic people to do business with. And they will reject generic, stock alternatives. It’s their nature.
So far I’ve covered the reasons why potential clients might reject you once they’ve visited your website. But what if I told you that…
They might not get to your website BECAUSE OF your stock photos.
Cyrus Shepard of Zyppy SEO did a traffic analysis of 50 websites from August thru December of 2023 to see if he could find a correlation between onsite website features and Google visibility.
Of the 42 website features he analyzed, stock photos had the 3rd highest negative correlation.
Granted correlation isn’t causation, but if there is smoke coming from your website, you better check to make sure that Google hasn’t burnt it to the ground.
I know going in and swapping out stock photos for real images of you and your staff might be a gigantic task. But this is a one off task that is worth the effort.
Potential clients are demanding it.
Google is demanding it.
The future of your agency is demanding it.
