A perfect flat lay with photos, hat, and sunglasses on a white furry background

Flat lay photography has become a versatile visual form for any small business. These minimalist photos of products taken from above and arranged with props use minimalism to create visual emphasis. That simple presentation style makes items pop, perfect for promoting products on a website or grabbing the attention of those browsing social media. Whether you’re getting started making your own flat lays or looking to master the technique, here are 8 easy tips for creating perfect flat lays. 

1. A Fully Clean and Flat Surface is Essential

Flat lays are named for everything being laid on the same, flat level. A completely flat and clean surface creates the blank canvas necessary to make perfect flat lays. Everything sits on an equal level and receives full lighting, leaving nothing obscured. That flat surface will also lack shadows, making it the perfect canvas to edit in texts or graphics when editing.

2. Perfect Flat Lays Need Proper Lighting

Bright lighting is what makes flat lays so eye-catching. To accomplish this, you need a soft, broad light. Natural light in a bright space can work but is out of your control. Artificial lighting will give you full control but can come with a cost. We recommend starting with a lightbox or ring light. These are relatively cheap in the world of photography equipment. If you’re interested in more professional grade equipment, a strobe light with a soft box provides a perfect mimicry of that soft, natural light of a sunny day. Of course, if you aren’t looking to get this equipment, you can always hire a professional photographer for truly perfect flat lays.

3. Props Bring a Flat Lay to Life

A flat lay isn’t just merely a photo of a product or something your company makes. It should also invoke a certain emotion or theme. Props help bring that life and character to a perfect flat lay by creating a lifestyle context that viewers can imagine. For example, a flat lay of cosmetic products can be brought to life with some related props such as makeup brushes.

4. Flat Lays are for More Than Just Products

Flat lays are great for showing off a business’ products, but they can also evoke a certain moment or emotion that’s associated with your brand. This is particularly great for businesses that focus on services. For example, a catering company can create a flat lay of an ornate table setting. An interior designer can have a flat lay of an idealized work surface that includes a blueprint, furniture catalog, laptop, and a cup of coffee. A salon might create a flat lay with the various hair cutting and styling tools they use.

5. Create a Colour Palette

Part of the effective and eye-catching minimalism of flat lays is accomplished with a limited set of colours that unite the image. Determine a colour palette that works well both with the featured product(s) or props while keeping the background neutral. This will help tie the entire picture together, giving it a cohesive look for a perfect flat lay.

6. Your Flat Lay Background Doesn’t Need to Be White

Part of designing your flat lay and its colour will mean choosing a proper background. Marble, tile, and wood can be great options depending on the content, but flat lays work best with solid colours. That doesn’t mean the background needs to be white, especially if the products you’re showing off are. Instead, a solid background of colour can help the items pop. A large roll of paper can create a perfect background. 

7. Don’t Underestimate Negative Space

Flat lays are defined by minimalism. If they become cluttered with objects, they become too visually busy and important objects blend into others. Keep a healthy amount of negative space in the flat lay and around each object. This keeps them distinguishable and visually prominent. A simple rule: if you think there might be too many things, remove one.

8. Take Multiple Shots

Like any photography, one photo usually won’t suffice. Take many photos of your flat lay at different angles and orientations from above. Then, rearrange items and take even more shots. It’s always much easier to take as many photos as possible when you have already collected and arranged the materials than realizing you need to collect and arrange everything again because you didn’t capture that perfect shot. Taking all these various photos will provide you with a rich library of shots to choose from, ensuring you have at least a few you will want to use.

Flat Lays are All About the Pop

They might be called flat lays, but visually they are anything but flat. These 8 easy tips are sure to help you start perfecting your flat lay photography. If you’re interested in professional flat lays, contact Rosewood about our brand photography services. We’ll be happy to help you create flat lays that truly pop.

A shop owner interacting with a customer.

Your marketing is essential to your business’ growth, but it needs to be focused. You can cast a wide net to get a few catches of the many fish in the marketing sea. That can be a functional strategy in some circumstances, but it is far more efficient and effective to aim your marketing towards certain target groups interested in your business’ products and services. To determine these targets, marketers create customer personas, which significantly improve the performance of all your ads. Targeted marketing is up to 5.3 times more effective for increasing click-through rates, nearly 40% of people prefer targeted ads, and targeted ads have shown to increase brand searches by 800%! Along with those conversions, these results will only increase your ROI even more, since you will spend less on target ads than on widescale, untargeted marketing. This guide will explain what customer personas are, how to create them, and how to use them in your marketing.

What are Customer Personas?

A customer persona is an imaginary person defined by certain demographics and characteristics of a key member of your current or desired target audience. Qualities that can define a customer persona are their interests, profession, finances, age, gender, language, locality, etc. These qualities need to be specific enough to define a subgroup of an audience, but also broad enough to reflect more than just one individual. Typically, a business will have multiple customer personas within its whole audience.

How to Define Your Customer Personas

To create and define your target personas, you will need to some research about your business’ current and/or desired audience. If you have been running your business for a few years, you should already have some familiarity with your business’ target(s). If you are already using Google and Meta for your advertising, these platforms collect valuable information about their users. They will provide you with a wide set of analytics about your business’ advertising and search to help generate target personas. There are numerous other research methods for determining target personas, including surveys, interviews, observing industry trends, and analyzing your competitors and their target audiences.

Don’t Forget About a Persona’s Role

An important aspect of these personas is their role. Certain individuals are more likely to make purchases based on certain roles in their personal lives. For example, Old Spice’s series of “Hello Ladies” advertisements that began in 2010 were a result of the deodorant company determining a major target audience of women customers who purchased deodorant for their male partners. While Old Spice’s primary audience consisted of men with the role of users, these women had the purchasing role that made them a critical target and essential to the company’s rebranding this past decade.

These roles can be more difficult to determine than the raw demographics provided to you by various marketing platforms and tools. They rely on observing and analyzing your customers’ behaviour. However, they can prove invaluable for understanding and strategizing around the purchasing power and decisions of a target customer.

How to Use Your Customer Personas

Customer personas will allow you to plan and specifically strategize any focused marketing campaign. Specific products or services of your business may not appeal to your entire audience, so knowing your business’ targets will allow you to properly focus on individual marketing campaigns. For example, PPC advertising platforms like Google Ads and Meta will allow you to set targets for each ad campaign. By defining your customer personas, you will be able to appropriately target each one of these ads. 

You will similarly use these personas in your social media marketing, to strategize which posts will best attract engagement. An important strategizing factor is customer personas’ preferred platforms. Certain targets may be specific to one platform for your digital marketing such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Any marketing on these platforms should be targeted toward the interests of that specific customer persona. 

The Importance of Refining and Redefining Your Customer Personas

Defining and targeting customer personas is not simply a one-and-done deal. You should regularly refine them as you receive more data and complete more research. This refinement will help you determine whom to exclude from your customer personas. For example, women might be a general target audience, but you may find that those under the age of 20 or those over the age of 60 are not typically your customers. This kind of information refines your business’ customer personas to be more accurate targets.

You will also need to redefine your target and customer personas as both your business and audience naturally change over time. To come back to the Old Spice example, the company is currently again retargeting its marketing as they have determined new younger customer personas. This continuous research is also important for developing and strategizing your business’ brand, products, and services. It’s not enough to merely know your audience, you need to keep understanding them.

Keep Your Eye on the Target

Creating and maintaining customer personas is essential to effective marketing and business strategizing. Knowing the subgroups of your audience will allow you to more directly communicate with them and grow your business’ reach among these individuals. It will also ensure your business isn’t pursuing audience dead ends. If you need help creating, finding, or redefining your target audience and customer personas, contact Rosewood’s digital marketing team. They’ll help you get and keep your eyes on the target.

Someone building an effective homepage on their laptop with stats.

Your website’s homepage plays an important role. It’s the first impression of your business’ digital space. It also doesn’t have a lot of time to provide that introduction. The average user stays on a webpage for only 5.94 seconds and they judge it in only 1/20th of a second. As a result, your homepage needs to be purposefully designed to create a proper impression quickly. For that, it needs to look good, communicate effectively, and motivate your visitor to stay and use your site. Our website design team has the first steps so you can start building that impressive and effective homepage. 

Who Are You?

Your homepage should clearly and concisely present what your business is and does. Name and display your main services or top products as the central thing visitors first see as they land on your homepage. They will immediately understand your business and see its products/services. This should also come with a short description that identifies your business’ name and what it does. First-time visitors to your site will not be familiar with your business. Use this opportunity to provide that information and show off your value proposition.

Navigable

Along with explaining who you are and what you can provide your visitors, you want to make it immediately clear how they can navigate your site for more information or products. Link the central images and descriptions to the appropriate dedicated pages so visitors can access them. The top should include a navigation bar with clear categories and page titles, so users know where to look and find what they are interested in. In addition to being a directional aid throughout your website, the navigation bar will quickly impress any visitor with the contents of your website, allowing them to understand its contents and services more quickly. Furthermore, your homepage will regularly be the return point for browsing. This easy navigation will ensure customers can readily move to the next page that interests them.

Calls To Action

Another aid to navigation that also helps keep a visitor interested is a call to action (CTA). Common examples are a prominent button in the middle of the page or in the navigation bar with a unique, contrasting colour. These will encourage your visitor to go beyond the homepage and guide them through your website’s main pages. The most common examples are “Shop Now”, “Learn More”, “Contact Us”, “Book a Consultation”, or “Request a Quote”. These short, simple instructions will also help a visitor immediately contextualize the products/services your website provides.

Newsletter or Contact Form

Presenting your visitor with a pop-up of a newsletter signup or contact form is an additional call to action that will keep your visitor connected to your website. These allow customers to learn more about your business, stay connected and return, and might include a discount as an incentive to purchase from you. 

Do not present this pop-up right away. Allow your customers to get their impression of your homepage and maybe browse a bit before prompting them with signing up to their newsletter or suggesting they provide contact information. An immediate popup will prevent them from seeing your informative homepage and come off as pushy. Why would they sign up for a newsletter or want to contact you before they know who you are?

Less is Better

Not overwhelming your visitor is essential. Minimalism is a hallmark for designing your website’s homepage. A homepage with too much text, images, video, or CTAs will only confuse or frustrate your visitors. Just like when first introducing yourself, stick to the essentials and be concise for a good first impression. Provide a single large image, a short blurb, and one CTA that shows the essentials of your business. Not every visitor will have the same interests about your business, so it is best to provide the basics and have them navigate deeper in for what they want. Additional details should be placed in their own dedicated pages that visitors can easily access through the navigation bar or calls to action. 

Optimized for Multiple Devices aka Responsive

A proper first impression means your website needs to function properly on various devices, particularly computers and mobile devices. As of this month, over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Your homepage needs to inform your visitor, allow direct navigation, and provide direction easily and elegantly on all of those different devices. If a visitor arrives on your homepage and not everything is visible or navigation is cumbersome or impossible, they will be left with a poor impression of your business and leave.

Adaptable

Your homepage should adapt to how visitors use and browse your website. Monitor website traffic to determine where users are going. If a specific service or product page is more popular, highlight it more immediately. This will sooner impress future visitors with the information they want. Remember you have less than 6 seconds. For example, if customers typically browse your new product page, it is a good strategy to link the “Shop Now” CTA to that page. Running user experience (UX) tests of your homepage and website will help you discover such potential site traffic patterns as well as unintended obstacles. Ever heard of heatmapping? Ask us about it!

Home is Where the Heart Is

Your homepage is the heart of your website. It introduces your business, directs visitors, and acts as the regular return point for browsing. It also does not have a lot of time to impress your visitors to stay and start exploring the deeper chambers of your website. These essentials will help guide you to create a homepage that gives the proper impression and welcomes your visitors. If you are looking to redesign or update your homepage to give your business the proper introduction it deserves, contact Rosewood’s website design team.