Where Exactly is Your “Happy Medium”?
What words would your customers use to describe your dealership’s vehicles based on the photos you’ve placed online? We all hope those words would be along the line of ‘beautiful’, ‘strong’, ‘classic’, ‘inspiring’, and ‘fantastic’. More often than not, however, auto dealerships have the opposite response from customers who view their images, describing what they see with words such as ‘sad’, ‘ok’, ‘nothing special’ and ‘meh’. No one wants humdrum words coming to mind when their pictures are viewed, but that’s the reality when customers see photos that have been posted online without careful consideration to scale.
Let’s put this in perspective (no pun intended). How often have you read an article online when you could barely see the image? Were you impressed? Were you squinting to see the image or did you give up because you figured it wasn’t worth the trouble since whoever put the image there would have made it larger to begin with if it were truly important.? That’s what your customers go through when you share an image that is too small to see, even if it is a picture of a sleek new vehicle.
Too Small or Too Big, both are Equally Bad
A small picture will be glossed over, missed or ignored, and won’t inspire any call to action, such as finding out more about that vehicle. Sure, you can enlarge that picture, to ensure it’s easier to see or even jumps out at customers when they land on your site or social media post, but enlarging a picture often leaves the image looking grainy and pixelated. Now, your customers not only fail to get intrigued by the car, they are also convinced that you have no clue what you’re doing on social media, or worse yet, that you’re trying to cut corners by refusing to hire a graphic artist or photographer to provide quality images. And who can really trust a vehicle that’s being sold by a dealer who cuts corners? You’re probably thinking you’re better off not sharing an image at all. That means you’re back to having mere text trying to do the job of a photo, and we all know that pictures – the right pictures – grab people’s attention, tempting them to click on a link, call for a test drive, or somehow take action that can lead to the customer buying / leasing that vehicle.
Our brains notice the details, instantly judging not just what’s in the picture but the quality of the picture. For automotive dealerships it is imperative to effectively portray their inventory, incentives, staff, and other pictures. Whether you are uploading images that you have taken yourself or you have a graphic designer
incorporating images into a special spread, you need to get the size and scale of the images correct.
The Right Tools
It almost seems like you’re caught in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation when it comes to using photos online. But that’s not the case, once you find the right tools. Sizing pictures is not difficult and doesn’t take a professional photographer or graphic artist to achieve. There are numerous sites that provide guidelines for determining the perfect size for images on social media. With such expert guidance and numerous tools and programs, the non-expert can create an expert picture for use in social media. Consider using a program such as Photoshop to edit your photos and optimize the scale of your pictures, or vector art programs such as Illustrator to create the perfect image when you can’t find one on any of the stock image sites.
Using the right scale in your posts can drive home the right message to your customers, creating a call to action, and ultimately can be the difference between making a sale or not.