Most of us have come to the realisation and accepted that digital is the current step forward, that with the right team potential is rarely limited, and great brands are well on their way to having a respected digital footprint. Understanding that Online Reputation Management, or ORM, as reputation and word-of-mouth have always been, is a key factor to any successful digital marketing strategy. Content and community managers’ numbers are on the rise and creative social media its ever flowing source.

Competition is a not a new factor but who we deem as our competitors is on the rise. Everyone online now has a potential voice, and it seems everyone has something to sell. All that can get a tad noisy and being heard in that chaos becomes important. Purpose driven community content following quality and not quantity is the new sword and shield, letting your community grow as organically as possible.

Reading a few recent articles, it’s understandable, how high quality images and graphics have a considerable impact on general acceptance and click through rates. It would’ve been foolish for me to not pay attention to what retouchers and designers have to say when working on images and graphics.

Digital photography has undoubtedly come to the table and retouching has followed with a bag of tools that could put Gramdma on the moon and shave off at least 20 years from her visage.

Retouching has become a fine art of creating hyper realistic images that could be slices right out of the real world. Brands spend a lot of time and money hand picking their marketing, creative and strategic teams, and great teams have big ideas. Unfortunately big ideas usually need big budgets, spending hundreds of thousands on bringing a concept to life. Having the option of creating these concepts digitally, hyper realistic images seem to be the next best thing. With quality digital photography as a solid base the right tools make nearly any visual concept possible.

‘Think of it as photo manipulation, taking the focus of an image and putting it into a brand new environment. Here you can decide the micro details of the image making it say what you intend it to. Understanding how people perceive visuals and the behaviour that follows is the key trick, how they see the things they aren’t even aware they’re seeing.’

A digital solution for a digital market.