In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, marketers are required to be effective and efficient in finding the perfect visual content for their marketing efforts. Marketer Jeff Bullas cites that articles containing relevant images have 94 percent more total views than articles without images. As a result, the need for sourcing photos quickly is when stock photo sites become marketers’ go-to option. However, this can be challenging and overwhelming as there are many royalty free stock photo sites for marketers available now. Therefore, this time we have narrowed down nine best stock photo sites for marketers to explore.
Top Five Free Stock Photo Sites:
1. Unsplash
Founded in 2013, Unsplash started as a simple tool for creators. The concept was born from the pain creators have in finding great, usable images. There are over 550,000 free high-resolution photos and over 90,000 photographers and creators contribute to Unsplash. All photos are definitely amazing, high-quality and inspiring. Marketers can do direct download, go through trending searches and beautiful curated theme collections.
2. Stocksnap.io
StockSnap was created to solve people’s frustration in searching for the right images for digital and print projects. They add hundreds of free high-resolution images weekly. Business-oriented and sharp photos what marketers will see when they scroll through this site. Special feature to watch for is that marketers can sort images by date, trending, views, downloads or favorites. Sorting by downloads will help marketers to see photos that people use the most.
3. Pexels
Founded in 2014, Pexel’s mission is to help millions of designers, writers, artists, programmers and other creators to get access to beautiful photos that they can use freely. Pexel also sources photos from Gratisography, Little Visuals and Pixabay and this may be why they are very diverse. They have hundreds of thousands free high-resolution photos. What interesting about Pexels is not only that their photos are nicely tagged and searchable, but photos also can be downloaded in custom sizes and filtered by colors.
4. Pixabay
Pixabay is a community of creatives, sharing over 1.5 million free images and videos. Their platform is available in 26 languages. Photos in this site can be filtered by orientation, category, size and color. Note that when it comes to download the biggest resolution, having an account is required.
5. Burst
Burst is powered by Shopify. Their goal is to build the best free image library for entrepreneurs. Burst truly empower people to start their own businesses by sharing thousands of free stunning high-resolution images, tips on using Facebook Ads and trending business ideas.
Next is Top Four Paid Stock Photo Sites for Marketers:
Generally, paid stock photo sites offer plans and pricing that consist of credit and subscription. Credits are perfect for occasional uses (valid for a year), while subscriptions are perfect for frequent uses.
6. Bigstock
Bigstock offers over 71 million royalty-free photos, videos and vectors. The website can be accessed in 20 language options. What great about this site is not only that photos can be sorted by most popular, any license and safesearch. At the same time, marketers can also do filter results by orientation, category, keyword exclusion, contributor, image type and number of people, which truly ease the searching process.
7. 123rf
As a 100% bootstrapped company since 2005, 123rf has helped many clientele and businesses tell their stories using photos, footage and audio that are available on their platform. There are over 109 million creative works and 14 languages to choose from. When exploring the website, marketers can expect to see a variety of categories, an extensive list of trending and cool tutorials.
8. Dreamstime
Since 2000, Dreamstime has been online and providing high quality images with over 400,000 contributing photographers and over 88 million photos, illustrations, clip arts and vectors. This site has 12 languages and offers both paid and free photos. Marketers who are familiar with Stocksnap.io and Bigstock know that Dreamstime has filter options with the combination of these sites. Amazing, right?
9. Klaud9
Last is none other than Klaud9. Klaud9 was founded in 2016 in response to the lack of high quality stock images for Asian markets. Over 7,000 photographers and over 130,000 Asian-specialized photos are in store in our Asia’s leading visual content community. Our filters allow marketers to perform highly targeted searches such as ethnicities helping marketers spend less time searching for the right photos and more time on creativity. Other than Marketplace, where marketers buy royalty-free photos, we offer On Demand Branded Content and Online Brief.
In short, these nine best stock image sites for marketers offer unique features that have the same goal which is to ease marketers in finding the right visual content they need quickly. Yet, marketers may have risked their brand reputations for not being authentic by using popular or most downloaded photos. Having this challenge then pushes competitive marketers to start getting exclusive and localised visual content for their campaigns. If what they need is Asian ethnicities, then they definitely have to check Klaud9’s On Demand Branded Content out!