Drive Traffic to Your Site with Infographics
If you want to grow your website traffic, boost audience engagement, and display complex information, let me tell you about infographics.
Infographics use striking, engaging visuals to communicate information quickly and clearly. Whether they’re presenting a timeline of events in a company’s history, breaking down some cold hard facts, or displaying the map at your local mall, they’re everywhere. They can also be part of your content marketing if you’re looking to reach a wider audience, and score some SEO points while you’re at it.
In this post, we’ll show you how to use and create infographics. The best bit? They’re surprisingly easy to rustle up, and you don’t need any design skills or deep pockets to do so.
What Is an Infographic?
An infographic is a visual representation of information. By combining images and text in a way that makes information nicer to look at and easier to understand. Take the following infographic explaining the purpose of an infographic is, courtesy of Next Library.
Infographics combine visuals with complimentary words to drive home anything you want people to engage with. They vary in theme and purpose and frequently include statistics, as well as icons or cartoon images to give readers a quick and comprehensive guide to a topic.
Why Are Infographics So Effective?
Because “your brain loves looking at pictures” Kai Tomboc, Easelly.
The human brain processes visual images better than written content. That’s why people are drawn to photos or videos over blogs and other forms of content, and explains the popularity of infographics. The fact of the matter is, visuals communicate better than words.
Infographics for Small Businesses
Infographics are no longer the domain of big corps with huge marketing budgets. Thanks to affordable tools (which we’ll get to), small businesses can also reap the benefits. A well-curated infographic can accomplish a number of things for your website.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of infographics on your business website.
Promote authority
Adding statistics and figures to your advertisements make them more credible. The truth is, the majority of people are put off by lengthy articles no matter how insightful they are.
Put yourself in the place of your visitors. On one hand, would you rather a lengthy article where there are no real clues on where the key data points are buried. Or, let your eyes drink in an infographic neatly highlighting the important stats.
When it comes to displaying, and making sense of figures, infographics are far more effective.
Improve SEO
If you’ve heard about search engine optimization, you’ve heard about backlinks-those votes from other sites that make yours rank better in SERPs. Infographics are a great way to build a bank-link network fast; if you make something shareable, other sites and blogs will see the value and share with their subscribers.
Educate customers
Infographics aren’t just pretty images to capture people’s attention, they are educational tools that can teach potential consumers about your product and brand- or something related to your niche.
For example, you could find research on how customers or the world at large are affected. A bamboo stray affiliate might make an infographic highlighting the effect of single-use plastic straw for example. Similarly, you could use an infographic to break down the carbon footprint of imported products, compared to sourcing local goods (like yours).
How Businesses Use Infographics
Infographics are useful whenever you need to communicate information quickly, or any time you want to make an impact with your data or your message. Let’s take a look at the best uses for small businesses. They can be helpful anytime to might want to:
Raise awareness
Is there a challenge in your industry (or close to your heart) that you want to bring to the forefront? An infographic can convey the severity of an issue, what is being and should be done to help.
Take a look at MoveForHunger’s infographic. With this eye-catching and humorous content, they’re aiming to go viral. At the same time realize the aim of fighting hunger.
Compare and contrast
If you have different services, products, or other things you want to compare, infographics are the perfect way to do it. The example below from affiliate marketing blog Coffeeble compares manual coffee makers. They use an infographic to help customers decide between two products to drive sales.
Simplify a complicated idea
If your business sells a complicated, sophisticated, or high-tech products or services, it might be better to explain how that works with, you’ve guessed it — an infographic. Take the following example:
While agriculture is not the sexiest of niches on the web, agricultural holding company Agroreserv created something great and attracted a decent amount of links with this infographic from Anton Egorov. It managed to take complicated data points about the business and translate it with bright images that communicated information about them in a way that’s quick and easy to consume.
Explain how something works
If you have detailed services you want to explain, or complex concepts like how-to guides, infographics are a great way to do it. Keep your audience engaged by presenting solutions and paint points, visually.
In addition to simplifying brain hurting concepts, they are also handy for revealing how intricate processes work. Take this one from Turf Blend, from PS_Design. The simplicity of their design makes it easier for most people to grasp how a multi-faceted product works.
Showcase a product line or service
For your product or services, showcase them with a well-designed infographic that breaks down the features and unique points. Take the example below.
Complete Solar hired Graphic artist Appollo to take on their data. He delivered an infographic that combined the order of steps people need to take to use the service alongside important details on time.
Summarize lengthy content
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Has your company done market research, product research, or a long-form report that would be valuable to a certain group of people? If so, put that information into an infographic, just like Namecheap did with this infographic to complement our 2018 TLD report.
Highlight a call to action
An infographic is an opportunity to guide visitors through a process. That might involve completing a user journey, making a purchase, or signing up for a subscription. This is the same way you would use a CTA in a blog but it’s more memorable.
Take the following example originally published by the tech recruitment platform AirCTO (acquired by Gojek Tech) to uniquely and clearly guide their candidates through Amazon’s hiring process.
Go viral
Why not make an infographic about something people are interested in? Then you have a good chance to go viral and generate some traffic. Check out this infographic from 99medialab. On face value, it’s a clean list annotating a simple image, but it was extremely effective garnering over 8000 shares.
Now that we’ve illustrated the best ways you can incorporate an infographic into your marketing strategy, you should be able to choose which of the above fits your goals.
Let’s get started creating your first infographic.
How to Create an Infographic
At this point it’s worth mentioning that a successful infographic depends upon two important factors:
- The infographic content needs to be aligned with your business.
- Consistent promotion of the content is critical to get continuous traffic and links.
The rest of the article focuses on how to meet both criteria over the following steps:
1. Choose a topic
Now’s the time to think about the type of infographic you want to create. What do you want to achieve? Translating a blog into a more consumable ‘how-to’ image? Something to explain how your product works? You might want to give people a better understanding of your brand, or industry, and why it’s relevant to them.
If you’re struggling for topics, think about what your audience is interested in. If you intend on using an infographic to increase traffic to your site, then you must understand how to come with content that meets the interests of your audience and is naturally relevant to your niche. This is going to take a little bit of research.
2. Research great topics
Taking the time to research what’s hot in your niche, or genuinely solve pain points in your niche will greatly improve the quality of your infographic. It’s easier to ride a standing wave than start one. Use keyword search and take a look at Google Trends to find out. Or check out Buzzfeed, Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter to learn which topics are being searched for the most.
Evergreen topics are always in circulation because they address topics that are consistently in demand. Your visitors want to see original content that offers solutions to their problems, and if these issues are ongoing, evergreen content can help new people over time. For example, if you can explain a common process that newbies often find confusing, go for it.
For some clues about what people are asking, try typing in common keywords in your industry within the website Answer the Public.
3. Collect supporting data and information
If you have your own data, great — you can skip the next step! If not, don’t worry. There’s a ton of public data available to you. The following sources display a high level of trust and present authentic research across a whole host of topics.
- The U.S. Government’s Open Data: Data on everything from agriculture, climate, and ecosystems to education, health, and public safety.
- US Census Data for Social, Economic, and Health Research: U.S. census data from 1790-present.
- Statista: Market research.
- Cool Datasets: A self-proclaimed “place to find cool datasets”
Once you have data, you can create an infographic with graphs or charts.
4. Break it down
Now you’ve come up with a topic and done your research, it’s time to hone the content. Begin by organizing the layout with sections and headers.
Distill your text into bullet points. Keep in mind that eventually, these points are going to be depicted visually. To remain readable, the text that remains should be only absolutely necessary for explaining the major concepts. Anything you can depict with an image in place of text, you should. Substitute words with icons and charts to communicate information wherever possible. Each section should contain just a few points or a couple of sentences.
Working with Infographic Tools
Now you’ve defined a goal, mapped out your content, and collected some data, it’s time to get started on designing your infographic. We’re at the stage where you will be turn your hard work into something visual. If you work with a designer this part is just a matter of handing them the information, letting them in on your goals, and letting them run with it.
As a small business owner, you may not have the luxury of a whole creative team at your disposal. Luckily, there are a variety of tools and programs you can use to create tasteful designs for free or for a low price.
To do it yourself, take the easy route using an infographic maker tool. Make something professional looking in a snap. Once you log in, select a template, configure your canvas, add your content then add predefined graphics via a drag and drop. You can insert charts, maps, or videos, save, export, and share. Pride yourself on delivering a top not infographic in just thirty minutes.
How to Choose the Best Layout
There are many infographics that can serve as templates that help present data. When used appropriately, the right infographic template can:
- Enhance comprehension of complex concepts
- Strengthen the persuasiveness of claims
- Make key insights more memorable
Here’s an example of an Easel.ly template:
Deciding on a layout means thinking about how many elements you have and how your story should flow. Be sure to choose an infographic template that suits the story you want your data. The goal of your infographic will decide which template works the best.
It’s a good idea to add an element of your brand imagery, including your company logo and symbols. This way you can be sure that people looking at the image will associate it with your company. If you don’t have a logo yet, use Namecheap’s free Logo Maker to make a beautiful logo in minutes.
Then, when you display charts or other visualization, be sure to make them fun and use your company branding as cues for how to personalize them. If you run a farm, you might include agricultural images in your visualizations (different heights of flowers or corn stalks, for example), while if your company produces high tech products, robots might be constructing your bar graph.
For each purpose, data can be represented in a specific way. Here are the most common templates and the types of things they are used for.
1. Visualized Article
For the content creator who wants to make a piece of writing more visual. This type of design is used for summarizing, explanations, reading comprehension for any content area.
2. Flowchart
Flow charts let you provide multiple answers to the same question. It’s ideal for explaining how a cyclical process works across your industry niche, the workflow of your organization, or content creators publishing a lot of statistical information or data.
3. Timeline
With this design, you can tell stories through chronological data, the history of your business, a product, concept, or industry.
4. Map
Use for showcasing data trends based on location, or comparing cultures and places.
5. Graph-Based
When there’s numbers, stats, and data to visualize. Charts are especially useful for content creators publishing a high volume of data and statistical information. These are also good for hierarchical processes, or a process that needs to be followed.
6. Comparison
Infographics and comparisons are a match made in heaven. Compare your products or services to reduce any snags in the sales funnel. You can even compare why your product is better than the competition.
7. Data Viz
Communicates data through graphs, charts and/ or design. Useful for making data-driven arguments, easier to understand (and a bit more interesting). Reports and insights.
8. How-to
Demonstrate instructions to achieve a goal or a CTA with visualized steps. That could be how to choose the right cup of coffee to something more
Further reading. How to choose the best charts for your data, and How to Communicate Using Data Visualizations.
Now you have an infographic template, just swap in your data and content. If there are any symbols or graphics that would catch readers’ attention, add them along with any other style elements.
Share, Share, Share!
Now you’re all set to unleash your beautiful infographic onto the world, you want to get in front of as many eyes as possible. Here are the key places to put your new infographic:
1. White papers, brochures, and other informational documents
Include the infographic within a white paper, brochure, or case study to help prove the points made on the document and to influence the reader.
2. Website and blog
This infographic should be posted on a landing page on your website or on your blog so that the infographic has a URL that can be shared. You don’t have to write a ton of copy. The visual content should “speak for itself,” if you will, so a small paragraph above the image with introductory text should suffice.
Add a piece of embed code to make it easier to share. And, score yourself some inbound links, since your embedded image automatically links back to your site.
3. Social media
Social media is on par with search engines when it comes to driving traffic to your infographic. Share yours on sites like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. With the right hashtags and a snappy caption, you can drive thousands of users to your site.
4. Email marketing
Send out an email to your leads, contacts, or any applicable marketing list with the infographic and pertinent information about the infographic’s topic. Make sure to use a call-to-action in your email.
Time to Get Started!
Infographics continue to capture people’s imagination, and if you’ve not worked with them before, there’s no better time to start. Thanks to the free infographic maker tools today, what was once a difficult task just isn’t anymore. You can run with your ideas and make something awesome to inspire your image hungry readers, without destroying your budget.
Now you’ve learned how to create infographics that stand out, how will they feature as part of your content marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments below.
