Using infographics for engaging & shareable content

Modern content marketing includes a lot of moving parts and different types of ads or materials. There are traditional advertisements, video ads, blog posts, and much more. But infographics offer the opportunity to entertain and inform your target audience members, potentially boosting your brand authority and conversion rate at the same time.

Today, let’s break down how you can practice advanced visual content marketing by leveraging infographics like never before.

Infographics explained

In a nutshell, an infographic is a piece of graphical information (like a chart or poster) that provides potentially actionable instructions or advice for a marketing target. Put more simply, an infographic is a chart that serves some sort of marketing or awareness purpose.

For example, imagine that you want to showcase just how effective your products or services are. To that end, you create a bar chart showing how satisfied customers have been with your product over time. That chart is combined with a few lines of advertising copy, and voila! You now have unique, informative marketing material you can use in a variety of effective ways.

Infographics are oftentimes used by industries and businesses that want to share technical or data-backed information with their target audiences. For instance, medical companies often use infographics to show how effective their medications are based on data-backed studies.

The benefits of using infographics for marketing

There are lots of benefits to using infographics for marketing purposes. As a few examples:

• Infographics allow you to show just how knowledgeable your brand is in its subject matter or niche. The more data and scientific information you can share, the more inclined a target audience member will be to believe you when you sell your products are the best in the business or make some other scientific claim
• Infographics also differentiate you from the competition. If your primary competitor has flashy ads but no data to back up their claims, you’ll be more likely to attract long-term, loyal customers
• Furthermore, infographics are important persuasion tools if a prospective buyer isn’t sure whether they want to give your brand a try. If traditional marketing arguments don’t work, like low costs, you might be able to sway those leads into paying customers or subscribers by providing them with hard information proving your brand is the best or your products have what they need

How to create and share infographics successfully

You’ll only see the above benefits if you know how to make and share your infographics smartly and strategically. There are five big tips you should keep in mind that follow.

Streamline the design

First, and perhaps most importantly, you should keep the design of each infographic streamlined and simplistic. Don’t crowd your charts, graphs, or other graphical information with a lot of other data points or images. All that does is dilute your message and make it more difficult for people to understand what you have to say.

Keeping the design of your infographics streamlined is crucial for fast absorption and the strength of your argument. The more you have to explain, the less inclined the average person will be to believe what you claim.

Frame infographics around stories

You should also try to frame any infographics you create around stories or messages you can summarize. That’s because stories make data — any data, including data in infographics — more memorable. More importantly, they make infographics shareable throughout your marketing network.

Framing your infographics around stories is the best way to make sure they’re remembered (at least broadly, if not in detail).

Keep text to a minimum

To facilitate good infographic design, keep any text to a minimum. You’ll likely need to include some sentences to introduce the topic, explain data points, and highlight the conclusion you want your audience members to draw. But aside from this, your infographics should be primarily graphical or visual.

If you look at an infographic design with a large wall of text or paragraphs that are difficult to read, get rid of it. Focus on transmitting the important information to your audience members via other means, like better graphs or smart use of colors. You can, of course, also include key terms or words for SEO purposes.

Consider colors carefully

Colors should be considered just as much as text. Indeed, the colors you choose will impact

• How the overall infographic looks
• The “feel” or emotions that the infographic evokes

For example, infographics with red and yellow colors are more likely to catch people’s attention. But colors like blue or green can inspire confidence and feel-good emotions in your target audience. For the best results, try to design your infographics with complementary colors — for example, red goes with green, and blue goes with yellow or orange. These color pairings will make your slides or graphs pop.

Whatever you choose, don’t use the same exact colors across multiple infographics or slides. The information will blur together in the eyes of your audience, making them less likely to absorb what the infographics have to say.

It may help to set up all of your infographics or infographic designs on a single project management dashboard. Look for quality dashboard templates with important features like categorization tools, renaming tools, and so on. That way, you can change or adjust your infographic plan based on which colors go with which slides or presentations.

Share across social media

Lastly, we would heavily recommend sharing your infographics across social media profiles and platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Why?

Social media platforms are perfect for sharing valuable information across the Internet as quickly as possible. If you already have branded profile pages on these platforms, putting your infographics of choice on those platforms will enable your followers to spread them far and wide much faster than you could buy yourself.

More importantly, posting your infographics on social media platforms will drum up important conversations about the information you have to share. More buzz is always a good thing, especially if you are trying to maximize brand awareness or authority in your subject matter.

Why infographics are the way to go

In the end, making and sharing infographics with the above tips in mind will do wonders for maximizing your visual content marketing success. The right infographics can sway prospective buyers who are on the fence to give your brand a try, plus showcase just how specialized and knowledgeable your brand is in its niche.