How to Pick the Right Photo for Your Business Flyer

Transcript

So you’re making flyers for your business. And now it’s time to pick the photo. But how do you pick the right one? Hi I am Carmen Sognonvi. And in this video I’m going to share with you three big mistakes to avoid when choosing a picture. And I’m going to share with you how to select the right picture that’s actually going to get effective flyer that gets you responses.

By the way if you’d like to get a list of the seven tools that I rely on, to run the marketing in my own business. Head on over to Carmensognonvi.com/tools. I’ll share with you everything from who we use for graphic design to printing. And the app that we use to track our flyer distribution. To make sure that our flyers are actually getting distributed in the right way.

Okay so in this video, I’m going to use the example that you are a piano teacher, and you’re making flyers to promote your piano lessons. That is an example that is near and dear to my heart because like every good Asian girl, I played piano throughout my childhood. And actually when I was in high school, that was my job. I was teaching piano. That was my part-time job.

Okay so you’ve to your flyer all designed. It looks something like this. And now all you have to do is pick the right photo. So you think to yourself, hmmmm. What would make a good photo? You think aha. I got it. Richter, One the best pianist of the whole 20th century. Every parent would die if their child would play as well as Richter right? So this is an awesome photo to use because it’s really aspirational and it’s send the message that yes, I’m all about high quality. And your child play as well as the world class pianist of the century.

Now this photo may mean a lot to you and may mean a lot to other pianist. But think about your target artist. Your target audience, is not professional pianist. They’re not classical music buffs. They are just moms and dads who are looking for an activity for their kid. So this photo will not mean anything to them. Plus it doesn’t; make it obvious what you’re about. So who is this old white guy? I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what this flyer is about. Remember that when someone takes your flyer, within one second they need to know exactly what you’re promoting. And this photo does not do that job.so the first mistake is don’t be obscure. Pick a photo that makes it really, really obvious what it is you’re promoting. Alright, so that picture didn’t work. You think yourself what else can I use.

Oh, okay here is a cool picture that might work for this flyer. Now this picture is a lot better because now you can actually see a piano. So it makes it pretty obvious right away what this is about. But, the problem with this picture is that it’s taken from too far away. Yes you see the entire piano, which can be a good thing. But it doesn’t have any immediacy. As an image it doesn’t really grab you. You’ll find that the more close up an image is, the more engaging it is. And especially if you’re using a photo of the person you want to make sure the photos is close enough so that you can see the whites of the person’s eyes. If you can see the whites of the person’s eyes then that is going to make a much greater impact than a picture like this. So mistake number two is using too far of an angle in your image.

Alright so that picture didn’t work. Now you’re rummaging through to see what other photos you have and ah, okay. I came across the three pictures that all pretty awesome. So let’s put them together so it looks like this. More is not necessarily better when it comes to using pictures. A lot of businesses make this mistake. In fact this is probably the number one mistake that I see when it comes to flyers for businesses. People tend to think that the more pictures I’m using the better. And unfortunately that’s just not true. When it comes to a flyer which is a small piece of paper you don’t have a lot of space to make an impact and to grab someone’s attention. Having several smaller images is actually much less powerful than one large image. Now if for example you are making some kind of longer market piece like it’s a trifold brochure. On the cover you should still use one big image. But on the inside, that’s where you can use several smaller images because then you’re getting into more depth about your offerings, things like that. And it’s appropriate to show photos that demonstrate different aspects of your business. On a flyer or the cover of the brochure you want to stick with one large photo. So mistake number three is don’t use multiple small images.

Okay, so now that we’ve gone over what not to do. What should you do? Well let’s talk about the mistakes again and just recapped them. The first mistake is being too obscure. You’ve got to use a picture that makes it really obvious right away what it is that you’re promoting. Number two is using a picture is taken from too far away of an angle. You want to use a picture that is more close up. Ideally if it’s a picture of a person, you want to see the whites of their eyes. And number three instead of using several smaller images you want to use one large image.

So let’s put that all together and see what we come up with. And came up with this. Now you see how this photo really captures all of the things I was talking about? Number one you see right away it’s a piano. Right away you know that this is about pianos. It’s probably about piano lessons or selling pianos or something like that. Number two, it’s a pretty close up view. So you don’t see the entire piano. You just see the piano keys and then you also see a close-up of a child smiling who’s playing the piano. And the fact that it’s a picture of a child also helps narrow down the target market because in this particular great case we’re trying to market kids piano lessons as opposed to adult piano lessons. And then number three we’re using one large image rather than several scattered smaller images. So do you see how this is actually so much more powerful? Because in the previous flyer where we had several smaller images. Some of those pictures were actually really good. And those could work well for this flyer but because there’s three of them and they’re all small, it doesn’t have that same impact as one big picture. So next time you design a flyer keep these three tips in mind when it comes to picking your photo.

Alright if you found this video useful, I would encourage you to sign up to get email updates from me. Just head over to Carmensognonvi.com/newsletter and you can sign up there. And if you have a question you would like me to answer in a future video. You can email to me at info@ Carmensognonvi.com.

Okay, so now it’s time for some shout outs. So this week I want to shout out, Carl Liles, Rally DNA and sorry if I mispronounce this as Golfouni Lecoteri. Hopefully that wasn’t too bad. So thank all of you for your awesome comments. I’ve linked to your profiles below. So everybody else be sure to check them out. And again I just want to thank you for watching.

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