Take Control of Your First Impression

14 Oct Take Control of Your First Impression

It’s a widely recognized fact that first impressions are a critical aspect of any relationship, and its importance is even more significant for business relationships; especially in high-trust industries like law, real estate, and medicine.  

The American Psychological Association has said that first impressions may factor into a patient’s decision to stay with a doctor more than actual skill. With this level of business at stake, you must take control of your impression, and the best way to do this is through your imagery.

Taking Control Through Image, Not Text

Many professionals, especially medical professionals, make the mistake of trying to convince a potential patient to create a relationship through text. There are few industries with as exclusive of a lingo as medicine. You can get much better results if you put a professional image in the forefront of your marketing.

You cannot control how people interpret your long blocks of text. You can, however, very easily control how people view a headshot or a professional portrait—especially when you’ve selected the right photographer.

Impression Testing

Creating new intro text or written descriptions is much more difficult and time-consuming than changing out a picture that is not doing so well on your website or in your marketing materials.

When you have great images from a great photographer, you can analyze the response of your marketing week by week and find your sweet spot relatively quickly. You also save yourself the brainpower of having to think of new topics for blogs or new ways to rearrange your wording to draw in customers. Images mean more control and an exponentially higher efficiency in determining your initial marketing strategy.

People Don’t Buy Products; They Buy You.

Whether you are an artist or a medical professional, you must understand that people are buying your services because they like getting them from you. Study after study has been conducted about how the bedside manner of a doctor is even more important than the skill of that doctor in performing his or her actual duty. When you put your image up front in your marketing campaign, you showcase a confidence in your abilities, and you allow your potential customers to get to know you first.

People rarely care about how much you know until they know how much you care. Images are much more efficient vehicles for showcasing emotion.

With the right photographer, you can capture the authenticity that the modern consumer is looking for in a business professional or brand. This can be very difficult to do when you are trying to communicate with someone who does not comprehend your industry lingo, but a smile is universally understood.

A few things to try to portray in your image that everyone will understand:

  • Confidence: Regardless of your profession, potential customers, clients, or employers are naturally attracted to someone who exudes confidence. The right photographer can help you illustrate this in your headshot.
  • Authenticity: People want to engage with the person, not the brand. Take measures to ensure that your photos are authentically depicting who you are.
  • Approachability: Your photo should make people want to know you. Ask your photographer to keep in mind that you are trying to form instant relationships through this first impression.

Use great images to showcase this in yourself, because people are primarily buying you.

The famed actor Willem Dafoe would know first impressions better than most, and he advises: “A lot of critics are lazy. They don’t want to look closely and analyze something for what it is. They take a quick first impression and then rush to compare it to something they’ve seen before.” The Association for Psychological Science quantifies this “rush” – you get a couple of blinks (tenths of a second) at most.

Every customer is a critic, so give them every reason to work with you and not against you. NYC Headshot is here to ensure that your first impression is the best that it can be.