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Do you know if your insurance agency is pushing out legal visual content marketing? Yes, that is something you should be concerned about as an insurance agency owner, because you could run into troubles with copyright laws. I’m sure you’re immediately asking yourself, how can I tell if the visuals that we’re producing are legal or not? Well, it all depends on where your marketing/graphics design team is pulling content from.
If you use an outsourced graphic designer, chances are that your content is most likely legal for commercial use. Most graphic designers are well acquainted with what visual is legal versus what content is not able to be used. One thing that I can tell you right off the bat is that if you get your visuals off of Google, the chances are that you are most likely at risk, that is of course unless you are using Google’s advanced search to filter out only images that are available for commercial use. Generally speaking though, the images that show up in Google’s image search results are pulled from all corners of the web, and there is a lot more copyrighted visual content on the web than there is commercially legal content. That being said, if you pulled an image off of Google, then it’s most likely under the creator’s copyright. The way you can avoid this is to only use images that you find from image search websites that only include images that are licensed for commercial use. There are a select list of websites that we on a regular basis, and today, we wanted to share them with you.
1. Pexels
2. Unsplash
3. StockSnap
4. Magdeleine
5. Splitshire
7. Pixabay
8. PikWizard
Now, as we’ve discussed in the past, it’s important to use a healthy balance with your visuals in your social media posts, emails, or any other visual content marketing you make use of. By a healthy balance, we mean that some photos should be organic pictures of your insurance agency, staff, customers, and clients alike, while other pictures will need to use stock images, like any of the pictures you find on the sites that we shared above. We discussed this fundamental and many more in our past article Visual Content Marketing Fundamentals. These are a set of fundamentals geared toward the advanced digital marketing professional who’s already spent significant time working on agency visuals. If you’re the insurance agency owner who realizes that you need more visual content marketing, or you’re a marketing professional looking to get started with visuals, we’d suggest taking a look at our article on Visual Content Marketing for your Agency. This article is more of a beginner’s level approach to visual content, and should give you direction if you’re just getting started.
Overall, visual content marketing is king, especially online. Make sure your insurance agency is making use of visual content in all of your marketing, but more importantly, make sure it’s legal so you don’t run into any trouble further down the line.
