Headshots and Your Branding

Successful businesses spend a fair amount of effort on their brand. Whether a B2B or B2C type business, the right branding can attract new customers or potential employees, and help differentiate you from your competitors.

Today, successful branding is more complicated with more “vehicles” to generate awareness of your brand - from social media, to blogging, writing guest articles, etc,, in addition to more traditional vehicles such as advertising. Business oriented sites such as LinkedIn are also rapidly becoming an important vehicle for businesses to promote their brand, particularly in the B2B space.

One of the unique aspects of LinkedIn is the ability for the viewer to search for information not only on the company, but it’s employees. Type a business name in the search box, and you can see a list of many (if not most) of the employees of a company. You can view their image, their backgrounds/experiences, along with posts and articles they have written and posted on LinkedIn - increasingly, businesses are encouraging their employees to post articles on their LinkedIn feed.When someone posts, their LinkedIn profile image is automatically displayed alongside the post.

To give the most positive impression to the viewer, you want the profile image to look professionally done - that image lends credibility to the person posting, and should be consistent with the level of professionalism a business wants to convey. And if someone is looking at various employees at the business, having a consistent, professional look conveys the business takes their image and branding seriously - and that consistency and professionalism is an important part of their brand.

A recent client wanted to create headshots of their staff in order to up their branding game - here’s the before and after. Which image do you think sends a better message of professionalism?