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January 29, 2020

Businesses: Employee headshots produce excellent ROI

If you’re considering an investment in professional headshots for your employees, you should know those personal images can produce a wealth of promotional benefits.

Not only can the photography process be easy and efficient with today’s technology, but professionally created employee images can serve a wide variety of purposes — all of which work in your company’s favor. Aside from their strategic use in company sales collateral, brochures, business cards, press releases and visual presentations, the images can go a long way toward adding personality and professionalism to the staff listings on your company website.

“It’s important to have high-quality photos of your team members, with a consistent image, mood and composition,” advises a recent post by web design firm Websolutions.com. It advises businesses to “Make your team page pop with team bios that bring your employees to life and create a sense of trust with your potential customers.”

In that spirit, here are other key advantages to obtaining high-quality employee headshots for your staff.

  • Transparency. When you prominently display your staff photos, you’re increasing the trust and credibility you’re building with customers and potential customers. The ability to connect names with faces can remind clients, vendors and partners they’re dealing with real human beings with human strengths and foibles, which can invoke a sense of empathy that fosters positive working relationships.
  • Optimal first impressions. When you contract for professional services, the employees who represent your company will be strategically lit, featured with appropriate backgrounds and positioned to appear at their professional best. “People will judge you on your looks long before they judge your words or actions,” notes Serenity Gibbons in Forbes. “After all, it only takes a fraction of a second to start making snap judgments.”
  • Building of your brand. The style, colors and poses chosen for your company headshots can help express your company culture and build on how you want your firm to be perceived. As such, a conservative, long-established law firm might ask its staff to wear dark-colored business suits and assume formal poses to suggest strength, studiousness and decorum, while a shoot-from-the-hip ad agency might encourage colorful, informal garb, playful body language and the creative use of props. “A professional photographer will help you with tips about the right clothing, expressions, body language, etc. to help you ‘measure up’ to your objectives,” notes a recent Forbes article that paraphrases photographer Mark Liflander.
  • Ease of recruiting. Potential employees can get a better sense of your company culture by checking out your employee gallery to see what kinds of people work there. A sharp, pleasant-looking, diverse staff may boost your firm’s image as a friendly, engaging and professional place to work.
  • Tools for company ambassadors. The headshots can be used by individual employees on LinkedIn profiles, press releases, speaking engagement collateral and other media that may promote your company directly or indirectly. LinkedIn recently determined a profile containing a headshot is 14 times more likely to be viewed than one without.
  • Competitive differentiator. Because many companies post no employee photos, yours could stand out from the crowd as friendlier and more human (as well as more progressive) if you take the time and effort to create a comprehensive, professionally designed staff website page.

Lifetouch can handle your entire employee headshot campaign at your office, from employee communications to scheduling to photography to production. Contact us to learn more.