Why are headshots so important?

It seems pretty counterintuitive to think that all the boring analogue stuff is important in a digital world.

You would imagine that in a world of emails, LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp groups and Slack meetings we have moved past a lot of the face to face stuff that used to be the bread and butter of the average worker’s life, whether you were selling insurance or delivering babies.

But while we might have cut out 90% of the face to face business we used to do, all that means is that the 10% that remains is extra important. It’s an old cliché that people buy people, not products, but what does all this have to do with professional headshots on your website? Let’s take a look.

Get your personality across

We might be teleconferencing with people half way across the world, or working on the same spreadsheet as someone fifty miles away, but for all that sophistication we’re still basically the same humans that we ever were. We like smiling, happy faces. We trust honest people doing honest work, and without a reference to recommend you, all your customers have to go on is how you look.

There is more evidence for this than you can count: 93% of Facebook’s most engaged with posts are images, your business is 60% more likely to make a sale when the website has images on it. But it’s not just about the sale. Your face on a professional headshot promotes approachability, which promotes networking and business. People who know your face are more likely to seek you out at events, remember you from a host of faceless contacts and trust you when you eventually do meet.

Play the emotional game

In 2016, Finnish analytics start-up Happy-Or-Not changed the world of customer feedback. Multi-level surveys, focus groups, statistical groupings and all manner of other complicated tools relegated in an instant by one thing: A box with a smiley face and a sad face on it. These boxes are everywhere now, but their invention was because of an important truth. Humans are complicated emotional machines, and what we think are original thoughts reasoning our decision over whether to buy something or go somewhere is actually our brain justifying the emotional decision that you already made within milliseconds.

Customers who see happy, confident, professional looking staff headshots with approachable faces are more likely to have happy brains arguing in favour of your business, not sad ones trying to find a reason to choose your competition.

Set the tone for your business

So if we’re competing against your customer’s brains, trying to get them to like your business without knowing why, then what has that got to do with your product? It’s hard to get emotional about some things, and if you sell plumbing supplies or electric fans then you might not see how this applies to you. But you should think again. Remember how people buy people, not products? Well with your business, customers aren’t buying fans or pipes, they’re buying your professionalism, your honesty, your commitment to hard work, your fair prices, your considerate staff, your technical knowledge and a million other things going on in their minds that they don’t even know about. All of those ideas would take a small book to get across in words, but with professional headshots of your staff you can make your customers see and feel those things without having to write a single word.

Your smart, compassionate, hard working looking employees say more with their faces than you ever could in a brochure, in a way that your customer’s minds are hard wired to understand. So why would you not use that powerful tool to your advantage?

Thinking you now need a new headshot? Get in touch with me today to find out how I can help.