Building a Business Photography Stock Library
The advantages of building a business photography stock library are many. With a large supply of photos, HR and marketing departments have lots to pull from for their various needs, including promoting events, marketing the business to customers as well as prospective employees, and website materials – all of which build the image of a business. I worked with Exact Target, now Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for many years growing their stock library, and at the end of over ten years had accumulated thousands of photos to pull from. By having pictures of their people and their space that defined their business image, they were always able to easily create marketing materials for any occasion.
I was working at Exact Target as a developer at first, and started work as a photographer when my interest and skill in photography was discovered. They asked me if I could put it to use in the company. I began simply with employee portraits, then moved to photographing the user conferences. For these events, the goal was to create images that would promote the next event. I took stock photos of the attendees as well as on-stage shots of the speakers, who were often big names like Richard Branson, Malcom Gladwell, and Seth Godin. By having their own images, all marketing had to do to promote the next event was to go back to the last user conference stock for fresh photos.
From there, the library just kept growing. To market the business to both prospective employees and to customers, the marketing and HR department always had things and people for me to photograph. I took a lot of stock photography of the office, going in and retaking pictures every time a significant remodel happened so the images stayed up to date. New employees were always photographed so they would have headshots for future speaking engagements or white paper attributions. HR would use the stock library to create printed photo books as gifts for ten year anniversaries. They would also make large banner prints of really cool concerts they hosted like Train, and events the business participated in like an Exact Target logoed Indy race car. These banners also served as popular items for auctions at fundraising events.
Exact Target kept their images in Dropbox folders so many different people in the company had access to them. However, the library grew so large, marketing and HR eventually asked me to be the keeper of the library for them, finding the images they needed quickly. Forming a relationship with a photographer is a good idea if you want to build an image library for your business. The value a photographer adds is not only image creation. It is the familiarity they have with your business that allows them to help you best manage your assets and build a consistent brand image. As a freelance photographer, I do this with many companies. I get to know them, the employees and their C-suite people, and it helps improve the quality of the photos. I know what images need to be created to tell their story.
Business photography needs vary from company to company. As an experienced business photographer, I can help you with professional headshots, executive portraits, stock image creation, group shots, and more. You can contact me here.
