This founder created a startup because finding stock photos was too tedious

Photo credit: Pixabay.

The images on your website landing page should clearly convey your service and the benefits of buying from your marketplace and being a part of your marketplace community.

We at Arcadier asked Keith Teo, co-founder of Raydar, a search aggregator for stock photos offering more than 120 million images, how to choose images that are perfect for a brand and the things he learned from his startup journey. As a former marketing executive, Teo knows very well the difficulty of finding images for marketing campaigns and how to best go about it.

Keith (center) and the Raydar team. Photo credit: Raydar.

What inspired you to start Raydar?

Raydar started as a solution to my own pain point as a marketer. I was a marketer at DKSH for three years prior to starting Raydar. Every time the marketing team had to launch a marketing or communications campaign, whether internal or external, we had to use a lot of images, and finding them was so time-consuming.

It was also when we were knee-deep in searching for stock photos that I learned that it is actually a huge industry, and there were so many brands out there. I’ve never even heard of many of them. That’s when we thought a platform like Raydar could be useful.

How can marketplace owners use stock photos to their full advantage?

The most common use case would be to use stock photos for an advertising or marketing campaign. Besides that, marketplace owners can use stock photos for their website and/or mobile app landing page and other key pages to increase engagement and better appeal to their target audience. More importantly, a strong visual  increases top-of-mind awareness, and it’s the cornerstone of a good brand.

You should use stock photos to test the performance and engagement of your marketplace website/s, and don’t be afraid to experiment and do A/B testing.

People say stock photos are cliché or unoriginal. Do you agree with this? 

I’d say newer stock photos are not cliché at all and actually look very authentic. The right stock image should be selected to fit the campaign’s target audience and tone. A brand usually has more than one target audience, each with different personas and different channels to reach them.

You should first start with understanding the campaign’s target audience and finding out which images would most likely resonate with them. The photo should also be aligned with your communication tone—is it a promotion or a launch?

What are the important lessons you learned in your marketing career that you could apply to your startup?

What are your three favorite digital marketing tools and why?

We want to know what’s in store for Raydar in the near future.