If you run a business, a brand or a blog – your photos are most likely part of your marketing strategy, and one of the best ways to connect with your audience or customers.

That said, you want to be intentional with your styling. Don’t shoot for the sake of shooting! Be mindful of what you want to communicate to your audience. Let me share a few tips for how you can style your photos to not just create a visually pleasing photo, but one that also communicates your intended brand message.

Incorporate storytelling

Many times, it’s not the cheapest product nor the one with the greatest specifications that sells the best. It’s the product or the brand that tells the better story that sells. That’s why you want to incorporate storytelling into your photos!

There are several ways that you can tell a story through your photo (and I go through some of them briefly in my free 5-days photography course and more extensively in my masterclass), but one important thing is to introduce a hero element. For the viewer to be able to understand your story, it has to be really clear what your main object is.

This is a photo that I took for Blomverket recently. The flower bouquet is the product that we sell, that’s why it’s in the spotlight (size, visual interest, and placement). When we pick the props we make sure that nothing competes with the hero element – everything else is only there to back up the scene and provide the atmosphere.

Another very effective way to make it easier for viewers to connect with your story is to include a human element in the photo. We all relate to other people, so when we see a human element in a photo it helps us to visualize and to feel as if we’re experiencing the story ourselves.

You want to create an illusion of something going on in the exact moment when you capture the photo. Maybe someone is right in the middle of enjoying a luxurious breakfast?

Learn to master Color Composition

Researchers have found that consumers make up their minds about a product in only 90 seconds and that 62-90% of that assessment is based on colors alone. Colors can dramatically affect feelings, emotions, and moods so this is definitely something you want to master.

Paring colors well will not only help you create visually pleasing images but also tell your story more effectively. So before you decide on your brand colors or the color of your logo, you’ll want to make sure that the colors are in line with the message you want to communicate.

In the early days of building our brand, Blomverket, my sisters-in-law and I wrote down the emotions that we wanted our brand to evoke. We wanted it to feel elegant, luxurious and feminine. We then created three designs with different color palettes that we had our friends to vote between and the winning color palette was this one:

Being consistent with colors also makes it much easier to match images with each other. Photos added to Instagram, for example, will automatically look good next to each other since they are all based on the same color scheme. 

In my The Photography and Styling Masterclass I teach different methods for pairing colors and how to create a color palette that evokes certain emotions.