Finding the Perfect Stock Image

Looking for a stock photo or illustration for your ad, marketing piece or website? It’s easy to lose track of time when searching the seemingly endless options. Next thing you know you’ve spent days scouring every stock image site and every possible keyword combination to find the perfect image. If you start your image search with a little planning, it could go much more smoothly. Here are some questions to help you get started.

• How long do you plan to use the image? Is it for a one-time promotion or a newspaper ad that’s running weekly? Obviously the more limited the life, the less it’s worth your search time.
• How much exposure do you expect it to get? A one-time football ad might get more exposure than every issue of your newsletter (depending on your newsletter size of course). Then again if everyone in your town of 800 reads your weekly paper, that’s pretty important exposure even if it’s only 800 people. You have to decide relative to your audience what’s significant.
• What is the role of the image in your marketing message? Grabbing attention is a given, so dig deeper. Do you want to add humor? Help people visualize your key selling point? You get the picture…there’s a lot of variety out there and you need to be looking for the right style.
• What is your brand image? If you have a sophisticated wealthy clientele, cartoon clip art probably won’t help you keep that audience; unless that’s your fun sophisticated niche of course. Even if the image fits this need perfectly, it also needs to fit your overall image.
• What’s your budget? Most sites charge according to a variety of factors, so knowing what you need and how much you can spend means you can skip options that don’t work.
• What media will you use and how big will the image be? This will help you decide if the large 300 dpi photo is worth the extra money. Think long term though. It’s not as cost effective to buy the 72 dpi PNG for your website today and then realize a month later you need high resolution for an upcoming magazine ad.

Based on this information, you can determine how important the “perfect” image is and set a time limit for searching. Save every image with potential in your library so when you hit your time limit you can quickly revisit the images you liked and pick the most effective one.