Dear fellow zoomers,
Today I am writing an insight piece when it comes to stock houses, you can also consider this my love letter to pocstock because I see what they have recently been up to, I want to see them succeed, and this market is changing in the most curious of ways.
As I always mention, marketing strategies are not always one-size-fits-all, but they can be one-size-fits-many. Marketing strategy transcends industry, product, and sometimes even culture, so if I was managing marketing within a modern stock house, here is exactly what I would do.
The majority of current stock houses face the same issues:
Quality – in this case, we are not talking about resolution, we are talking about providing a feeling of being natural and organic, while also being eye-catching and intriguing. Most stock houses miss the mark here, the images they provide do not feel natural, they are overly staged, and do not blend well into a content feed. That mixed with the fact that most marketers are obligated by organizations to over-treat photos with big flashy words and sales opportunities makes the end result less than interesting, and often low-engaging.
Diversity – most stock houses lack the necessary diversity that is more commonly desired in today’s content, this has made it more of a challenge for marketers to find both quality and diversity in a single photo, and dates photography that cannot convey various demographics in modern themes.
Community – meeting marketers and other potential customers for stock photography within the digital space means being able to convey the humanity behind the stock company, and provide resources within reason that are valuable to their target customers. The majority of stock houses find themselves lacking on social media, limited in conversation, and sterile on how to guide people in using the very content they are trying to convince others their tool will support creating.
So, with some of the bigger challenges being fully laid out, here is what I would do if I were leading the marketing department of a stock house.
User Experience, Market & Competitor Research, and Customer Feedback
I would meet with the team that manages our website – and discuss what marketing has observed as some of the most successful image-based user experiences. Freeform image galleries where images are not necessarily placed in tight conforming even rows perform better, are more adopted by competition, and provide the end-user an experience closer to their own social media feeds like Instagram or Pinterest.
I would also discuss setting more goals around accessibility – double-stuffing keywords and descriptors behind images so they are results for all possible matches, incorporating a search-by-image feature, ensuring previews of images are high resolution within search functions, removing any redundant or repetitive titling, adding “similar photos” prompts to the search function, and ensuring framing of images on their product page does not inhibit the visibility of the entire photo, because of templatized cropping. Navigating our UX on a regular basis will keep consistent feedback in the hands of the team members who need it to improve our site experience.
I would work with our asset management team – to review our most popular downloads, so we can closely follow customer trends and interests. I would also advocate for incorporating a feature on the site that allows people to thumbs up or down images when they are logged in, this will allow customers to tell us what they like and dislike, and for our creatives to get direct feedback on their work. They don’t have to guess. This is also an opportunity to gamify the site for creatives with the highest likes being an incentive for a prize and to upload more work.
Now – My Favorite Part – Marketing, Social Media, and Content.
Social media could very well be the crown jewel of our marketing efforts, this is where we can show our stuff. This is where we can leverage the product to interact with and develop a deeper community. So we need to drop the formalities and the stiffness and get natural.
Social media should not only be leveraging our collections, it should be leveraging trends and culture, we have stock video so let’s show others what it can do. Create relatable, humorous, video content leveraging stock assets. Leverage CapCut, leverage TikTok, and make memes.
We can inspire other creators, designers, and marketers by leveraging UGC (user-generated content) that will walk the customer through design tutorials, and how to best leverage our stock product. We can give people design walk-throughs and leverage partnerships with other organizations such as Canva to show people how photography can go through a treatment process or be utilized as a standalone.
We can get behind-the-scenes video footage of photo shoots, to highlight our conviction of sharing real photos of real people. We can take our long-form interviews and adopt content syndication through a tool like Opus Clips to provide quick snippets or teasers of the interview and lead them back to the longer interview.
We can build out longer posts on a platform such as LinkedIn or from within our newsletter, leveraging our CEO ( Steve Jones 😉) to provide thought leadership from within our industry. Harnessing the power of personal brand and expertise to drive people back to the main organization. On average, the founder or CEO of an organization can have from a third up to more than double the amount of influence/following as the organization they built, this is because people love people, and this is what we leverage.
We marketers (a portion of the stock customer base) are struggling to provide people with natural, stylish, and relevant stock, that doesn’t look overly artificial. We are struggling with accessing high-quality mock-ups that can be delivered pre-built in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Canva formats, and we are often struggling with finding the exact image we are looking for based on the keywords we think will deliver us a result. In terms of pain points and leveraging marketing initiatives, this is all just the tip of the iceberg, if I was in a space like this today my head would be swimming with potential options.
Instead of making this a 10-page essay of all the things I’d do in the stock space, I will just give a couple of bullets below for some of the things we didn’t get to touch on today.
-Interviews and upcoming events are available on the website.
-Adding filters for traditional and authentic stock based on organization definitions.
-Determining who on the team will be the identifiable faces and voices of the brand on social media and can pre-record footage.
-Leveraging a portion of the email newsletter within a LinkedIn newsletter with a CTA to finish the newsletter by subscribing.
-Ensuring we have a TikTok and are at a creator level so we can leverage trending sounds, and cross-posting on Instagram.
-Incorporating 🟠🟡🔵 as regularly used emojis in our social copy, because branding.
The Grand ol’ Conclusion
For one, I had way too much fun writing this! But more importantly, and for two, the stock industry and other industries, are changing fast. With the incorporation of AI into many stock houses, and with the rapidly approaching inability to discern between what is real and what is AI, having brand, marketing, and personality, will be one of the only ways to stand out.
Having a mission packed with conviction that others can not only align with but can see in the results you are producing when sharing digitally is becoming more and more vital. The ability to convey real humanity in a digital space built to bring humanity together has somehow been lost in favor of ads, promotion, and preaching. How will a stock house being built in this competitive market really stand out? By leveraging their product to showcase exactly what we are looking for and can’t seem to find… humanity. – and that’s on #marketing!
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Once again my fellow marketers thank you for reading, I hope you got some juicy gems out of this edition of Hashtag Marketing. Don’t forget – this lovely letter is powered by The Less Than 1% Club, founded on the premise of bridging the gap between marketing professionals of color and the BIPOC businesses they could empower. Be sure to follow to show us we are on track.
Until next time and signing off for the day,
Claudia Lopez
Claudia Cherrington Lopez 