Images In Your Marketing

You’ve heard it time and again we’re sure “a picture speaks a thousand words” and it’s why images in your marketing are so important.

In this article “images in your marketing” we will share with you some resources we use and some important information you must be aware of when searching Google for images to use in your marketing.

We’ve had to wait over a year to write this article due to an ongoing legal case with Getty Images which we finally settled a few weeks ago.  It’s why forearmed is forewarned.

When we created our first WordPress Website – we found a ‘comp‘ image that we thought would look good for linking to the Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad Poor Dad book on our resources page as images in your marketing are very important as we’ve said.  We subsequently didn’t use that image and in innocence it remained in our WordPress Media Vault.  Tip: delete images you don’t use from your media vault!

Some years and sophisticated robot trawling software later that image was tracked down and we were issued with a letter by Getty telling us we had unlicensed use of their image and must pay up or they would take legal action.  A year later we finally settled as our defense was considered no defense in their eyes and we honestly didn’t want to go to court.

We don’t want you to ever have to go through this yourselves so below the facts

Images In Your Marketing – Legal Stuff

This license information to help you use images in your marketing is provided courtesy of LawDonut

Firstly make sure to read about using Google Images

Know the kinds of rights with images:

• Labelled for reuse with modification: This means you can use the image as long as you modify it in some way (e.g. merging two images). Each license will specify how an image can be used so make sure you read it.
• Labelled for non-commercial reuse with modification: This is the same as above, but after modification the image can only be used for non-commercial use. For example, on your blog, but not in marketing campaigns.
• Labelled for reuse: This means you can reuse the image without modifying it, but as mentioned above make sure you check the full terms of the license.
• Labelled for non-commercial reuse: You can use these images without modification but only for non-commercial use. The license details will give you more information on what this means for each specific image.

Images In Your Marketing – The Good Stuff

Now you know what not to do and what you can do here are some of our favourite resources we use in our marketing.

Free Images In Your Marketing : Pixabay.com

We use this service all the time to create our marketing materials for our blogs (in fact the one you see at the top of this blog is credit to Pixabay.

Always check what license attribute there is for the image you choose (see above)  For the image we used in this blog it was “Free for commercial use / No attribution required”

Images in Your Marketing : Canva.com

Canva is perfect for adding writing to images and it has a full range of templates for social media making it very easy to use images from Pixabay for example and really make them your own.  Great for Facebook Ads too.  You can sign into Canva using Facebook or Google +

Images in Your Marketing : Fotojet.com

Fotojet is a new service and one we are really enjoying using.  It’s a free service but some great ideas for making collages, posters, social media graphics (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube etc), magazine covers and photo cards.

We especially liked that you can easily create Facebook Cover Images easily importing your own photographs.

Images in Your Marketing : Pexels.com

License free images you can use in all kinds of ways and if you subscribe you will be sent new images every day

Images in Your Marketing: Unsplash.com

Beautiful quality images for all kinds of things from Facebook Posts to Lead Capture Pages.  You can also submit your own images to be used if you love taking photographs and don’t mind sharing them

Sometimes you will want a very specific image for your marketing and we use Shutterstock as they are very reasonable and once you have purchased them can be used multiple time (check the license for each image however)

Finally there are of course many different Apps you can use on your mobile devise for adding text to images or creating collages.

The one we use and love is WordSwag for writing on images (paid) but there are plenty to  choose from.

We hope you found this useful for staying safe while using images for your marketing.

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