15 Dec 2009, Posted by Peter in Design, Little Bits, Travel 2.0, 1 Comments

Stock photography and travel marketing: finding the balance

Since the arrival web 2.0, online space has been an absolute dream for marketers and DMO’s in overcoming the intangibility of the tourism product.

While video streaming, online travel communities, and virtual tours have played a revolutionary role in bridging this gap, Photographic imagery has maintained its significance during its shift from print to digital. Apart from online photo sharing through Flickr, Photobucket and the like, photography fills a very specific role in tourism and hospitality websites.

As important it is to have visual media on your site, marketers should carefully think about how they source these images.

Hiring a professional photographer is definitely the most appealing option. It is strategic, goal-orientated and personal. Unfortunately it is expensive, especially if you are a smaller establishment with a conservative marketing budget.

The second option is to use existing photographs provided by the company or accommodation provider. (If you’re the owner, this means photos you have taken with your own camera). As a marketer, you might be forced to use these pictures if your client does not have the budget to hire a photographer. Let’s be honest, there are some obvious downsides to this.

This brings us to the third option, Stock Photography. Yes, this is irrelevant to an extent, since you can’t buy stock photography featuring your specific hotel rooms, branded transfer vehicle or tour guide. You can however buy high quality stock images on attractions, landmarks, tourist activities, and nature (to mention a few). Depending on quality these images cost anything between US$ 10 and US$ 100, while certain sites offer them for free.

So, let’s summarise:

Stock photography is:

-Reasonable in price, considering the quality and the price of hiring a photographer
-Easily accessible, downloaded with a click
-Assorted (most stock photography sites can be browsed by category)
-Professional
-Valuable to the travel and tourism industry

Stock photography is not:

-Product specific
-Exclusive (many sites might feature your photo – during research travelers can easily pick that up)

Taking these characteristics into consideration, there are key factors marketers should be aware of:

Combining Stock and amateur photography.

Be careful when featuring stock photography on a website primarily optimised with ‘amateur’ photography. This can cause an imbalance, not only in your design, but the message you send out to the traveler. Stock photography should not always come across as stock photography. It should blend in with the rest of your visuals, not stand out like a sore thumb.

The Promise

What you regard as simply a picture could mean so much more to the traveler. To him or her it is a promise. A promise of what they will see, feel, taste, and experience. Most of all it’s a promise of what they will be paying for. Not using stock photography strategically can result in a broken promise. If exceeding customer expectation is a key element of selling the service product successfully, imagine how hard it will be to accomplish if you couldn’t match your customer’s expectations in the first place.

Finding the balance

All of this is relatively simple when approaching it strategically. First evaluate what you will use your images for. If you’re written content or other visuals on the section or page promote a specific product (food and beverage, tour vehicle, room view, pool amenities, tour guides, receptionist etc.), avoid using stock images. When other content handles a less specific part of the product (destination/area overview, game, natural surroundings, local events etc.), stock images can add real value and appeal.

If you are marketing a Tourism Consulting product or DMO, the use of stock images will obviously not play the same role (or have similar restrictions), as marketing the hospitality industry. In these cases imagery will represent company values or geographical coverage, rather than a physical product or experience, and ultimately have less risk when using them.

All and all, the quality of stock images and their usability for designers make them beyond attractive and to many, unavoidable. I hope that this post gave readers some insight to the value of using these images strategically, rather than falling back on them as an ‘easy’ guarantee of price and quality.

Below is some useful link love