It’s no question that creative storytelling is top of mind for PR professionals. The objective of nearly every press release, pitch, webinar and case study is telling a compelling story that will not only entice a journalist, but will help the company communicate and strengthen the relationships with their target audiences.

With that being said, telling a good story usually requires an audience and, in today’s world, it’s increasingly difficult to capture and keep attention spans long enough to transmit the message and spark the desired reaction.

A recent article by Time covered a study, which found that people now have shorter attention spans than goldfish – individuals generally lose concentration after eight seconds, where the average attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds.

So how can stories avoid falling victim to the pile of tossed-aside content?

The answer lies in creativity and not getting complacent with old storytelling strategies. Storytelling with photos is an underexplored tactic and has the power to communicate a message in a quick and powerful way.

For example, if a long-form article is not resonating with the intended audience, take a moment to brainstorm alternative ways to repackage the content. Such as telling the story with images.

This can be done in multiple ways and with the accessibility of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, has the potential to be shared across multiple audiences.

A great article by PetaPixel shares the following six tips for telling stories with photos:

1. Create a plan that includes your topic and the type of images you want to include.
2. Determine if you will use a single shot or a series of images.
3. Take “strong” images. This means an image that conveys emotion and has layers of meaning.
4. Trust your instincts and take the photo, even if it might not be “perfect.”
5. Be original. To echo the points made earlier in this post, people are presented with an overload of information every day, so telling stories with images they’ve never seen before will be advantageous in keeping their attention.
6. Don’t be afraid of failure.

Any good story needs a beginning, middle and end. Storytelling with photos is no different. PR and communications professionals will need to consider the above six steps to determine how they will bring their story to life through images. A few possibilities for PR storytelling could be to illustrate a customer case study, results of a survey or a new product announcement. Using photos applies a deeper level of connection and enables the reader to visualize and understand your product or solution quicker than words can convey.

I look forward to exploring different ways to utilize photography in PR storytelling and would love to hear ways in which you’ve been successful with your photo storytelling PR campaigns.