Why read this? : We share the 5 key areas where Photoshop is used in marketing. Learn how to use it in market research, brand identity, advertising, digital marketing and e-Commerce. Read this to learn the benefits of Photoshop for marketing.
Our senses send around 11 billion bits of information to our brains every second. But did you know that 90% of those come from what we see?
Our sight helps us in all sorts of ways. It helps with basic survival needs. Is there anything dangerous here? Where’s the food? Does he or she fancy me? And it helps us with advanced self-improvement activities. Like reading high-quality marketing blogs 😉
In fact, our brains love images. They’re hard-wired to process them. And interestingly, we can process images around 60,000 times faster than we process words. So, if you want to influence customers, you have to influence what they see.
How customers see you
As part of our coaching, we help businesses work out what makes customers think, feel and do things.
With visuals having so much impact on our brains, it follows that they play a huge marketing role in influencing customers.
You want them to see your brand in the right way. Because how they see you, influences whether they choose you. That could be moving images, i.e. video, but for this article, we’ll focus on static images.
Our marketing photography guide already covers the basics. For example, how to define your objective. The media channels where you use photography. Where to source photography, if you don’t do your own. (see also our evaluating photos article).
However, there’s clearly more to images than that. Many online graphic design resources also cover photography. For example, sites like Behance and Dribbble are great for inspiration. Sites like Adobe Education Exchange are great for learning. And you can find many resources on sites like Envato and Canva.
But, you get the most control over your photography when you do it yourself. That’s why this week’s focus is on the benefits of Photoshop for marketing.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is an advanced photo editing program, which has many uses for marketing. (See also our previous article on photo editing).
We chose Photoshop, as it’s the best known. Plus, it’s the tool we use when we edit photos.
If you don’t have Photoshop, there are other tools which can also edit photos like Affinity Photo and GIMP. Check out our thoughts on these in our graphic design tools guide.
Adobe Photoshop is like a Swiss Army knife
Adobe Photoshop is like a Swiss Army knife for marketing. You can use it in many different ways. And once you start to use it, you wonder how you ever got by without it.
At its most basic level, you can use Photoshop for marketing to :-
- adjust and crop photos to fit any size of space.
- combine photos.
- add or remove elements from photos.
- adjust key photographic elements like saturation, brightness and exposure.
- add text, graphics and visual effects to photos.
These all help you create attention-grabbing visuals to attract customers. In fact, just think about how much photography you already use in your business.
It’ll be in your advertising and sales promotion materials. On your website and social media posts. And, it’s what represents your brand on other websites, like the product pages of online retailers.
So, you have to know how to optimise images for all these different areas. That’s where Photoshop comes in. You use it to help customers see your brand in a better way.
Photoshop for marketing - Market research
Let’s start with understanding what customers want. That means market research.
For new advertising campaigns, packaging and marketing innovations, you want to understand how customers will see those changes. What they’ll think of your plans.
But, to gather that feedback you have to show them what the changes will look like. It’s hard to imagine changes based on just words. To get a realistic reaction, you need visuals for customers to look at.
However, you often need to test new ideas for advertising and products early in the research process i.e. before your actual visuals are finalised.
If you’re at the concept or prototype stage, you can use tools like Photoshop to visually bring those concepts and prototypes to life. You can mock up realistic-looking visuals of what your advertising, packaging or marketing innovation idea will look like when it’s done.
Example market research concept
Let’s say we were creating an advert for this article. And, we wanted to advertise on outdoor billboards.
We could draw out the advert on paper and get creative feedback on it that way.
But, as per our advertising evaluation and media planning guides, the context of where, when and how customers see (or hear) an ad, makes a difference to the impact. You wouldn’t get feedback on this context from a concept drawing.
Another option would be to create and design an actual outdoor advert and put it on an actual billboard. But, this would take time and money. But Photoshop could do the same effect faster and cheaper.
With Photoshop, you grab an image of a blank billboard and then combine it with your mock-up to simulate a real billboard advert. This is a fairly easy and quick job in Photoshop.
It’s also easy to adjust the colours, font styles and composition to show multiple options to respondents in your market research. e.g. adding brackets to e-Commerce in the title of this article to make it clearer.
Market research on multiple concepts
In fact, it’s really common in advertising market research to show customers multiple concepts in real-life situations.
You ask them to review each concept and talk about what they like and don’t like. You try to work out the impact it’ll have on them.
In this example, you can see we grabbed a picture of a Heinz Baked Beans tin and mocked up 3 rough variations of a basic advertising concept.
This took about 30 minutes. Which gives you an idea of how you could easily research different options. Which headline works best? Is it better above or below the image? What about different font options and styles? How do different colours work together? And, which ones have the most impact?
This sort of mock-up stimulus helps you ask these types of research questions. But, you need a tool like Adobe Photoshop to make the marketing stimulus in the first place.
You get a more accurate reading from customers when they can see advertising concepts as they’d appear in “real life”. They don’t have to imagine what the context would look like. It’s right there in front of them in your mock-up.
Ask customers why to understand their reaction to visuals
Using Photoshop for marketing research is more common with qualitative research. It’s because it’s most useful when trying out different concepts to work out “why” customers prefer one version over another.
While there are also quantitative ways to test advertising, what’s shown in that research tends to be closer to a finished version. You generally only get a liking and preference score from this sort of research, which doesn’t help you diagnose the “why”.
Photoshop for marketing - Brand identity
Photoshop can also play an important role in creating tangible assets for your brand identity. Photography is often one of those assets.
For example, your brand assets may include specific photography of the product, the advertising or the people behind the product.
Photoshop can help make sure these hero images appear consistently and repeatedly.
Consistency and repetition are vital. They help introduce and reinforce associations of those images with your brand.
That means, the next time customers see those images, they recognise them as coming from your brand.
For example, when you create a hero image on your website’s home page.
This is often one of the first images people see from your brand.
You can use Adobe Photoshop to make sure that the image and any other key visuals look as good as they can. For example, we often use the Filter / Sharpen option on Adobe Photoshop to make sure key brand images don’t have rough edges.
We’ll use the Adjustment Panels and Levels to improve the way Shadows, Highlights and Midtones look on those images.
And, we’ll make slight adjustments to Hue, Saturation and Brightness to make images “pop” on the screen.
You can also take sourced photography, and adapt and tailor it to better fit the brand identity on your website. For example, using colour blends and gradients which match the colour in other parts of your branding, is a great way to build more consistent colour use on your website.
Photoshop for marketing - Advertising
Advertising is another activity where photography plays an important role.
From a purely sensory point of view, radio is the only media channel that doesn’t directly use visuals. (and even then, often radio copy describes what a situation looks like).
All other channels include some sort of visuals, either video content for TV and cinema for example, or photography for print, point-of-sale materials and outdoor advertising.
When it comes to advertising, visuals matter a lot. On average customers are exposed to around 5,000 adverts every day. And yet, how many do customers remember, or even notice? Not many.
In fact, how many adverts do you remember seeing in the last 24 hours? Probably a lot less than 5,000.
Our subconscious brain filters incoming sensory inputs and decides what to draw our conscious attention to. And what to ignore. If your advertising visuals aren’t relevant and distinctive, customers will screen you out.
Von Restorff effect
Relevant to this topic is what’s known as the Von Restorff effect. This is well-known in design circles, but not well-known by marketers.
It’s named after a German psychiatrist who showed that when people look at a group of items, the one which captures attention is the one most different from the others.
People focus on visual differences, rather than similarities. (More on this in this article).
This is important when you think about how your advertising compares to competitors. If you use a similar style, then your advertising won’t stand out.
It’s a common use of Photoshop for marketing to use its technical capabilities to create advertising visuals which are distinctive from competitors. That helps your brand stand out from the other 4,999 brands your customers see every day. The best brands stand out from the crowd.
Example of advertising creative amends made in Adobe Photoshop
Let’s look at an example we mocked up to show you a typical use of Photoshop for marketing in the advertising development process.
Here, we want to create an image to help advertise this ring.
The original image on the left wasn’t done specifically for advertising. In fact, it has more of a lifestyle feel to it. Look at the colour palette, with its muted brown and green autumnal colours.
But say our advertising goal is to highlight the product (the ring itself). There are many ways we can edit the photo with Photoshop to help the product stand out and look better.
You can see several adjustments to the original made with Adobe Photoshop, in the right-hand shot. (If you’re not interested in the technical side of Photoshop, skip this next section).
How we created this effect in Photoshop
First, we used the Quick Selection tool to create a copy of the ring itself. We then copied and pasted this (in place) onto a new layer, which sat above the original.
We then added a Black / White filter via the adjustment panel to the original photo and toned down the brightness and contrast.
Next, we added a diagonal gradient mask with a red hue and reduced opacity (about 20%) to bring a little warmth back into the background. Pure black and white can look quite harsh.
Then we focussed on the cut-out version of the ring. Remember, we cut it out and put it on a separate layer at the start.
Here, we adjusted brightness and contrast up a little, and added a gold colour overlay, so the gold popped out more.
Finally, we grabbed a screen flare from Adobe Illustrator and put it behind the gold ring to make it look like the ring was sparking with light.
If we were publishing this for real, we’d spend more time polishing it. It’s just a mock-up to show you can create something with a lot of impact, in a short space of time. Photoshop is a great tool for creating and optimising print, promotional and point-of-sale items. You edit, add and remove visuals so key elements stand out and you get the impact you want. Optimising your photography for advertising is one of the most common uses of Photoshop for marketing.
Photoshop for marketing - Digital marketing
Your advertising isn’t the only place where customers see photography from your brand though. You’ll also have photography on your website and social media posts. Photoshop is a great tool to improve the impact of these photos.
These can be done in-house. You take them yourself or hire a professional to take specific shots. Or you outsource it, using stock photo sites and license-free photo sites like unsplash.com and pexels.com. (See our photography for marketing guide for more on this).
However, there are likely to be differences in styling and specifications when you use photography from multiple sources. For example, they might be different sizes and orientations and have different effects. So you use Photoshop to bring consistency and standard styles to these photos.
Composition and visual appeal
Photography also has an important role in terms of composition and visual appeal on your website.
You need photography to break up long blocks of text, and to help visually signpost content.
So, you’ll see we add photos to our articles and guides so we don’t have too much text in one go.
We use signpost images, like, photographs of someone using a camera on a page dedicated to photography.
Your website design will also have different dimension sizes for hero images at the top of the page, and images you combine with text in the main body copy. Photoshop has a lot of easy cropping and resizing tools. You can use it to make sure photos “fit” into the spaces your web design allows for.
For example, for each main topic we cover in our guides which has multiples articles, we create introduction index pages like this one.
We needed Photoshop to adjust each image’s height and width to make sure they were all consistent and aligned on the page.
This makes sure the edges align both horizontally and vertically with the other images. Doing this makes the layout of the page clearer and more visually appealing. (See also our evaluating photos article for more on this topic).
Photoshop for social media
The same need to crop and resize applies to optimising images on social media. Each channel has its own dimensions, and they change regularly. For example, you find different dimensions for header images, profile images and actual posts on each platform. (Incidentally, it’s worth bookmarking online guides which helpfully track social media dimension changes and keep an up-to-date reference list).
If you want to use the same image across multiple social channels, you’re going to need to be able to crop and resize it to fit all these different dimensions. Photoshop is a great tool for this. It even has lots of standardised dimension templates, to help you find the best one.
In fact, this applies to ALL types of media. So, for example, you may need an image to work both on a 96-sheet outdoor billboard and in a 1200 x 630 pixel Facebook post. These will need different levels of resolution and sizing. Adobe Photoshop is great at managing jobs like this.
And of course, social media content being what it is, you’re also going to need to turn your photography into something worth sharing.
This might be as simple as adding funky text or effects to make the image stand out.
For example, our three monkeys of creativity article used Photoshop to colour the monkeys into each of the three insight colours – yellow, red and blue.
Very quick and easy to do in Photoshop.
In fact, manipulating images so they are optimised for blogs and social media is one of the most common uses of Photoshop for marketing.
Photoshop for marketing - E-Commerce
And last but not least, there’s Photoshop for marketing when you use it in e-Commerce.
Previous articles have covered the need for good product pages to drive online sales.
Product images are a big part of this. It’s one of the most basic elements of e-Commerce that you must show people what they’ll be buying.
One of the biggest disadvantages of selling online is that customers can’t touch or feel a product before they buy. They can only see it on a screen.
This means you need to get maximum value out of your visual impact.
For example, one of the most common uses is to create mock-ups of your products.
This is especially common in Print on Demand. You create a design, then use Photoshop to place that design on a picture of a “blank” item. A T-shirt, mug, face mask or whatever you sell.
You can also use Photoshop to manipulate the background to add a lifestyle feel to your imagery.
For example, we use a lot of beach backgrounds for our shop images as we’re based in Australia, and live near the beach.
This creates better branding for your e-Commerce products, versus more generic backgrounds.
Conclusion - Photoshop for marketing and e-Commerce
What customers see, clearly has a major impact on what they think, feel and do. Sourcing great photography is a great way to build your brand identity. But you also need to edit and manipulate that photography to fit many uses in marketing and e-Commerce.
Adobe Photoshop is a great tool for this.
Typical marketing activities where you’d use it include creating concepts to test out in research and creating final artwork for advertising and packaging. It’s hugely important in digital marketing and e-Commerce at a practical level – making sure images are the right size. And at a persuasive level – making your products look as good, so they sell more.
For us, Photoshop is a helpful tool to edit and optimise images to create maximum impact with customers. And of, course, it can also save a huge amount of time, money and effort in how you carry out all of these marketing activities.
We’ve lots of experience in using Photoshop for marketing. Check out our Photography for marketing and Graphic Design tools guides to learn more. Or, get in touch if you need help with your photo editing skills.
Photo Credits
Billboard (adapted) : Photo by DesignClass on Unsplash
Yellow Jersey Woman holding camera : Photo by Marco Xu on Unsplash
Eye : Photo by Daniil Kuželev on Unsplash
Glasses : Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
Night time billboards : Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
Flowers : Photo by Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
Ring : Photo by Jackie Tsang on Unsplash
Bus stop : Photo by Jay Clark on Unsplash
Three Monkeys : Photo by Joao Tzanno on Unsplash
