In today’s world, pictures are your first impression to the buyer. The process may begin with a focus on “quality of a picture,” which is a vital requirement to maximize ROI. This may require staging or a professional studio solution to achieve, but equally important is how to create and present media from the pictures. Creating these picture sets can be chaotic but there are methods to create order to the process.
Interactive media is a proven method that captures and engages a visitor into the buying experience that will increase sales. Presenting 360-degree spins with the vehicle’s doors both closed and open, providing interior panorama views, displaying a panorama view of the under-carriage, emphasizing specialty features, truthful display of wear & tear items and standard gallery pictures are becoming a visitor’s expectation as companies such as Carvana have successfully made their vehicles standout and have reached a national market utilizing most of these tools. I have had many manufacturers and dealerships contact us about how to develop a process to capture pictures and tools needed to create the advantages provided by the above methods.
As mentioned, the process starts with the quality of the picture. This is the most inexpensive task you will complete that will significantly increase your ROI — and it’s the most overlooked. Simply said, “take the time to do it.” If you are limited in space or budget, consider staging your vehicles in an open area that has minimal negative reflections (other vehicle or objects reflecting into the paint from the photographer’s position). If space exists, consider a photo booth that provides a lighted, protected environment for photography, or if the budget is available, install an automated photo studio for the process.
After picture quality is obtained, the task will turn to gaining consistency in the position, location, size and order of each picture, combined with obtaining the same set of pictures from each photographer, and placing pictures in the correct category to display within each media set (360-degree spins with doors closed and open, interior panorama views, panorama view of the under-carriage, specialty features, wear & tear items and standard gallery pictures).
This may appear to be a daunting task, but there are multiple methods to obtain the structure. If you want to do it yourself, consider taking pictures in a defined order for each category and transferring them into folders for each media set, and then setup your website to accept the categories and upload.
A more efficient method would be to utilize a service that offers media production tools that have the categories defined, convey to the photographer which pictures to take, with examples, and uploads the content for you into a script that can be placed on your website for interactive display of the media. Another option is to move to a high-production studio process that does it all within a drive-thru process and without you ever needing to touch a camera.
Whichever process you chose, it’s important to meet a visitor’s expectation of quality pictures and an interactive experience. Picture gaining order over your chaos today.
