How To Use Lifestyle Photography for Product Launch Campaigns
When launching a campaign for a new product, using brand-consistent product photography is an essential tool within your marketing efforts. Whether you are promoting your product with a social media campaign or adding new content for your email newsletter, it’s important to have a diverse collection of images that showcase your product in the best light.
As a commercial lifestyle photographer, my goal is to work with brands and businesses to guide clients through the process of developing original images that are useful across all platforms. And in this blog post, I’ll be going through ideas on how you can use lifestyle photography to maximize the effect of your product launch.
Please note that photos below were taken as speculative images and are not associated with a product launch campaign for Bose.
Storytelling Through Photography
While e-commerce photos are a great way to showcase the details of a product, lifestyle photography goes a step further and showcases your product used in a fitting environment. Storytelling in photography isn’t about just creating beautiful photos, but considering how your audience would want to use your product. It’s important to think about who you’re talking to and what you want them to experience when they first see an image. With a brand product launch, you have to be able to establish these points right away.
Think About Your Target Demographic
Jumping off on the last point, who is most likely to buy your product and how will your images appeal to them? Understanding this point will be helpful in deciding the aesthetic of your shoot, but it can also impact where you want the photoshoot to take place and which models (if any) you want to feature in the brand advertisement campaigns.
Use Models for your Product Campaigns
Speaking of which, hiring models to be a part of your product launch campaigns is one of the best ways to add storytelling and specify your target demographic in your images. Adding models into the images allows for a greater variety of options to choose from compared to your product standalone.
Consumers are able to see themselves in lifestyle photos with the models and the images add a level of interactivity that you can’t otherwise.
As a lifestyle photographer, I work with models consistently to produce high-quality outdoor photoshoots.
Promote The Content on All Channels
With the variety of lifestyle photography you get from a product launch, it’s beneficial to be able to advertise the images on as many of your channels as possible. Whether it’s social media posts, social media ads, print marketing, email marketing, on your website, etc. - promote the photos on all of your channels to get the most out of each shoot.
As a quick note, it’s important to note that photographers might have certain licensing limits in regards to where you can post the photos and for how long you are able to use the license in order to renew it.
For my clients, I provide an unlimited non-exclusive commercial license so that all photos taken for the product launch can be used for any platform in perpetuity without having to track licenses for each image.
How To Start: Pre-Planning The Shoot
One of the best ways to help your product launch campaign go smoothly is to properly prepare for the shoot in advance. Here are some things to think about during pre-production:
A Mood Board: showing off the location, models, and overall vibe of the shoot
Model Casting: if models are included in the campaign, find ones that match the demographic of the shoot
Check the location (Outdoor/Studio) in advance
Shot List: figure out what kind of photos you want to have featured (Close up of the logo, laughing shots with the model, etc.)
