If you’re not using infographics in content marketing, you’re seriously missing out.
There’s a reason why businesses of all kinds have been relying on infographics for years. Our brains are hardwired to prefer visual cues, which is why 91% of people prefer visual content over text.
So, what makes infographics so appealing to content marketers? And how exactly can you use them to boost your content marketing results?
Don’t worry, I’ll help you figure all of that out.
But first…
What are infographics?
An infographic is a visual representation of any kind of text or information.
Whether it’s a step-by-step on how to create an online course or the history of television, an infographic can help you convey that information in the form of an interesting visual.
Even the illustrated manual that comes with your washing machine is an infographic.
Infographics typically combine text and graphic elements in a creative way to achieve various goals, like:
- Breaking down a complex concept
- Summarizing information
- Making boring data and numbers look good
Check out one of the Quuu examples:
Notice how it generously uses white space, bright colors, and illustrations to convey information, rather than a wall of text.
There are tons of different types of infographics you can use in your content marketing strategy, including statistical, timeline, flowchart, informational and list infographics.
It entirely depends on the nature of your content and what you hope to achieve with it.
Why infographics should be part of your content marketing strategy
Okay, so first of all…
They look great. Infographics can make even the dullest of topics look interesting.
Think about it…
What would you rather read? Ten pages of a text-only research paper or a colorful image summarizing all the key findings? Exactly.
If your content doesn’t look good, chances are not a lot of people are going to want to engage with it. Using infographics instead can help you get your point across without putting your audience to sleep.
They’re easy to digest. Infographics are more than just pretty pictures. They can also help explain complex information by breaking it down into visual bits and pieces.
They’re shareable. People love to share interesting visual content on social media. Take a look at your own Facebook or LinkedIn feeds if you don’t believe me.
If you want your content to get shared and even go viral, infographics are one of the best ways to make that happen. Add your website link along with your infographics to drive more traffic.
They’re good for SEO. Text-based posts aren’t the only way to rank for target keywords. Infographics can help you show up in Google’s image results.
Plus, they are a great link building tool. If your infographic gets a lot of backlinks and shares, search engines will pick that up and help it rank higher for relevant keywords.
They help increase brand awareness. You can add your logo, website and company information to increase brand awareness on multiple platforms.
If you’re a nonprofit, infographics can help you spread awareness about a cause as well.
How to use infographics to boost content marketing
We could go on and on about the benefits of infographics, but let’s talk about something even better: how to incorporate them into your content marketing strategy.
There are tons of creative ways you can use infographics to boost your content marketing. Here are a few of our favorite ideas:
Spice up your blog posts
Turn your blog posts into engaging, interactive pieces of visual content.
You can either sprinkle mini infographics throughout a blog post to break up the text visually, or create one big one that goes right at the top and summarizes all the key points.
Here’s how we add mini infographics between the text over at the Visme blog.
Bloggers can also give their readers something different by creating an infographic-only post once in a while. Add some introduction and conclusion text to supplement it.
This is a good strategy to get your blog posts shared on social media and drive more traffic.
Explain a complex process
A common goal of content marketing is to educate your audience.
Infographics can help you explain difficult concepts by illustrating steps and breaking down processes into easy-to-digest, visual chunks.
For example, teachers can better explain concepts to students with the help of a process infographic, like the one below:
Similarly, businesses and nonprofits can help their audience better understand how certain processes work by illustrating the steps.
Using infographics to educate your audience adds more value to your content, creates more engagement and helps you achieve your content marketing goals faster.
Visualize data and statistics
Using solid data to support your content is a great way to build trust with your audience.
But instead of using boring tables and numbers, visualize the data and help your audience see your point.
Here’s a neat infographic by Yo!Kart, an eCommerce platform, that visualizes a bunch of statistics related to online shopping using a bar chart and more:
If you’re a B2B company, using them to share relevant industry insights with your target audience can help position you as an expert or authority in your niche.
For example, an email marketing software can create infographics on email marketing statistics to share the importance of this channel with their target audience.
Send off as an email
We all know that email and content marketing campaigns work hand in hand to drive traffic, increase engagement, and nurture potential leads into customers.
But what if I told you that infographics can help you 10X your email/content efforts??
If you’ve recently published an infographic on your blog, you can send off a juicy part of it to your email subscribers along with a link to view the full version.
An even better idea is to turn your newsletters into infographics and watch your engagement rates soar.
Here’s a great newsletter I received from Careem a while back, wrapping up my 2019 milestones with their app:
Share infographic snippets on social media
We already talked about how this type of content is more shareable than most other content types, but you can’t exactly share a long infographic on Instagram.
- It won’t fit.
- If you force it to be a square image, it just won’t be readable.
The solution?
Chop it up into mini-infographics (or infographic snippets) to share it on all your social media channels.
Here’s how we tweet mini versions at Visme:
If yours has several content blocks, such as a header, a bar chart and a list of key points, you can crop and share each block as a separate post on social media.
People scrolling through their social feeds usually don’t have enough time to read a full infographic, so they’re likely to engage more with snippets.
Plus, breaking it up gives you more content to post on your socials—win-win!
Repurpose existing content
Let’s face it.
A lot of blood and sweat goes into creating a high-quality piece of original content. That’s why it makes total sense to squeeze out every little drop out of it.
In the digital marketing world, this means repurposing a content piece into different formats to reach a larger audience and maximize its impact.
Infographics are awesome tools for repurposing long blog posts and even videos into engaging visuals you can share on social media. For example, you can create a list-style one summarizing all the key points in your article:
Infographic content marketing tips
Infographics are one of the best content marketing strategies out there, but only if they’re done right. Here are some tips to help you improve yours:
Use a template
If you don’t work with marketing agencies or have an in-house graphic designer, use a template to create a professional-looking infographic on your own.
There are plenty of DIY infographic tools out there, such as Visme, that let you customize a template online without needing to download anything.
Most of these tools also come with a drag-and-drop editor, so don’t worry about having no design skills or experience. All you need to do is literally replace the placeholder content with your own, change colors and fonts if needed, and you’re good to go.
Tell a visual story
The best infographics have a strong structure and follow visual storytelling principles.
This means you can’t just grab a bunch of stats, throw in some illustrations and copy, and have yourself a nice infographic. Each element should be connected, relevant and working towards telling the same story.
Also, make sure you pick a single topic to focus on.
Whether it’s about email marketing best practices or how to bake a cake, it should be something specific. Broad topics only result in cluttered infographics that achieve no purpose.
Use icons to illustrate your point
Your infographic is pretty much useless if all you did was stuff it with text.
We get it. It can be hard to distill several long paragraphs into a few lines of copy. But this is exactly where icons can help you out.
Use icons to emphasize key points, or even completely replace words and subheadings. They help you balance the visual-to-text ratio and make it more fun to look at.
Take a look at the infographic example below:
By replacing the brand names of Apple, Android and Windows with their respective logos, this visual looks clean, uses minimal text and still manages to convey its message.
Note: If you’re considering replacing text entirely with an icon, make sure it’s a recognizable one. I’d suggest sticking to famous logos and popular symbols.
Brand your infographic
Infographics offer a great opportunity to familiarize your audience with your visual brand elements.
When designing your visuals, make sure you use your brand colors and fonts where applicable, and add your logo somewhere in the footer.
This helps increase brand awareness and prevents other people from taking credit for your infographic, especially when it starts getting shared a lot on social media.
Make it interactive
If you really want to make your infographic stand out from others, add some animation and interactivity features into the mix.
Throw in stuff like motion effects, animated characters, clickable links and CTAs to create interactive infographics that are more likely to grab attention.
Add social sharing buttons
People love sharing infographics, and you can make the task even easier for them by adding interactive social sharing buttons in the footer of your visual.
Wrap up
Infographics are a godsend for marketers who want to incorporate meaningful design into their visual content marketing strategy.
Anyone can throw a bunch of stock photos into their blog posts, but creating infographics that are well-designed and research-backed can take your content marketing to a whole new level.
If you want to make your own, head over to Visme’s drag-and-drop infographic maker that offers a huge library of pre-made templates.
Happy creating!
