If your business is planning to hire a photographer to do some editorial or corporate photography, here’s a question for you: What do you expect that photographer to do?
The obvious answer might be that you want the photographer to do good pictures. Does the term “good” mean the pictures should look nice?
Perhaps a better answer is that the photographer should do effective pictures. The word “effective” means the photos should help accomplish your business goal.
What is your business goal?
Ultimately, the only goal a business has is to increase its numbers. Those numbers might refer to selling more product, acquiring more subscribers, getting more viewers to the corporate web site, increasing the company’s reputation or attracting more investors.
Before you hire a photographer, you should know what you need to increase your numbers. Then you must communicate those needs to the photographer:
• “We need some pictures of our office,” means little to a photographer.
But “We want to show that we are an organized, established business,” tells the photographer that the office pictures must go beyond photos of furniture and decor.
• “Can you do some pictures of our quality control lab?” doesn’t say much.
Instead, “We want to show our customers that we take quality control very seriously, we have a state-of-the-art facility and our people are the best at what they do,” says it all.
• “We need some pictures of our new product,” is vague.
“We want customers to see how easy the product is to use,” describes the outcome you need.
It’s like making a Hollywood movie. You’re the screenwriter who creates the story and the photographer is the director (and cinematographer) who brings your story to life.
