Pictures are everywhere.
The amount of pictures taken in the U.S. on a daily basis is truly mind blowing. It is tough to walk down the street anymore without catching someone taking a selfie. 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day. That number is staggering.
With so many pictures flying around the internet, it is easy to forget the value of professional photography. These days everyone is a photographer. If you have an iPhone and a few Instagram filters, you are capable of taking decent looking pictures.
However, there is a difference between professional photography and Instagram pictures.
With so much attention being focused on the marketing, it can be easy to let something such as professional photos slip through the cracks. The pictures may be the most important pieces of content on the site.
Here are 3 reasons why you need to have high-quality photos on your website.
Moms, Dads, and New Clients Want To See Where They’re Going
Put yourself in their shoes. A potential client is sad and lonely and hooked on drugs and they are about to agree to spend 30 – 90 days in an inpatient treatment center. This trip usually requires them to leave everything behind, to fly to a different state and to trust that someone on the other end of the phone is going to provide all the resources that were promised.
They are nervous and want to have some kind of idea where they are going.
This is why you need pictures of the facility. No mother is going to send their child to a treatment center that doesn’t have pictures of the facility. No addict is going to travel all the way to a treatment center that he or she has never seen. People need to have some kind of visual reference point.
It is important to make these pictures high quality.
The average person is savvy enough to know when pictures are taken from a smartphone. A high-quality DSLR camera will really make the difference. It may seem at first like a smartphone camera will take good pictures, but it’s not until you see the same shots with a DSLR camera that you get a real understanding.
Also, let us not forget that photography is, in fact, an art form. Instagram has polluted the art form a bit, but a professional photographer will understand angles, lighting and shutter speeds.
Spending the money to go the extra mile will make a big difference.
Photography Will Establish Trust
What’s the expression? – “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
One undervalued aspect is forgotten about in the entire admissions process. That is trust.
Again, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. If someone calls your facility looking for treatment, you are just a person at the other end of the phone. This person doesn’t know you, they have no reason to believe what you are saying. They don’t know what you look like, where you are from or what you do. At this point, you are a complete stranger, and why should they think of you in any other way?
Now imagine that same scenario, except the phone rep or administrator takes the time to guide this potential prospect to the website. This way the rep and the admit can look over facility pictures together. They can even look at staff pictures together. Many times, the phone rep can bring a potential client to a staff page and say, “Look that’s me!”
That is building rapport. That is building trust. That is what separates good treatment facilities from great ones.
Great facilities understand the enormous responsibility they are undertaking and they go out of their way to make the client feel comfortable and at ease. If there is no trust established, the only way to bring in a new admission is to essentially trick the person. This may include telling them things that they want to hear simply so they agree to come. This is an unacceptable act and in the long run, it will only hurt the client and hurt your facility.
Photography establishes trust. People want to see what they can expect. As long as the photography matches the real thing, the admissions experience will be a comfortable process for both family members and clients alike.
Put Your Best Foot Forward
Salesmanship is a great skill.
When people think of a salesman, the typical car salesman comes to mind. Someone who can easily mince words and paint a pretty picture. Yes, these type of sales people are out there, but the truth is that this type of sales tactic is relatively ineffective.
The real way to sell a service or a product is to be authentic.
Photography displays transparency. By putting pictures of your facility on your website what you are doing is openly saying…
“This is our place. We are proud of our treatment center. We do the best we can to make it look nice. We hope that you like it.”
You are also giving people permission not to like your treatment center. It is counter intuitive but by being authentic and transparent, you are doing more to build trust with them then you would by putting up the most glamorous yet inaccurate pictures you can find.
If a treatment center posts pictures that are not an accurate representation of the facility itself, this creates a different form of buyers remorse. You can bet that an unhappy client is calling home to mom and dad and telling them about how your company lied about what your facility really looks like.
It is best to sell through authenticity. It is best to be open and honest. People appreciate it. They appreciate that you wanted to put your best foot forward.
Professional Photography is Expensive!
Yes, it is.
A professional photographer can easily cost a few thousand dollars or more depending on the scope of the job.
It is one of the most important investments you can make. All of the marketing and SEO will mean nothing if the traffic that comes to your site does not convert into a patient. In order for traffic to convert, trust must be established. In order to establish trust, you must provide high-quality photography!
You may think that hiring an amateur or taking the pictures yourself is the more cost effective option. But there is nothing cost effective about missing out on business because you didn’t want to spend the extra money to create a remarkable website.
In the treatment industry, where there is so much at stake, nothing should ever be done half-assed.
