When you’re putting together a marketing or public relations campaign, don’t forget to invest in proper photography – of your people and your products. Human beings are visual creatures, and it has never been more important to present your brand well from a visual perspective.

But please – and yes, I actually am begging here – get a professional to do the job. Just because you have a selfie stick and a camera on your phone does not mean that you can do this yourself. A skilled, professional photographer knows how to paint with pictures – how to take your campaign goals and translate them into visual language. This is not a point-and-push kind of job.

Having a file of professional, high-quality, high resolution* images is also vital if you’re sending out press packs. And if you have team members who are acting as spokespeople or putting out thought leadership pieces, you need professionally taken, high-resolution pictures of them too.

Bear in mind that many newspapers have cut back on their photography departments to cut costs, so anything that comes with a good picture – a picture that helps to tell the story – will have much greater appeal when a journalist or news editor is considering your release.

* As a rule of thumb, a picture that is at least 300dpi or 1MB in size.