We all know infographics, especially in the context of (content) marketing.
But where did they come from? Why are they so popular and what makes them such an effective marketing tool?
Well, just the fact that we only read about one in five words on a website (because we’re just too lazy) already speaks for visual content. In addition, there are many social media and content platforms through which we can come across graphic content almost every day.
The use of infographics brings several other advantages.
In this article, we explain how companies can use infographics in their content marketing.
Table of Contents
What is an infographic and why is it such an effective marketing tool?
Let’s start with a definition first.
The word “infographic” is derived from the two words information and graphic. Its primary purpose is to prepare a lot of complex information visually in such a way that the viewer can understand it within a very short time.
That makes sense and is so effective because our brains are primed to process visual information. A whole half of the brain is exclusively responsible for this.
Cognitive psychology has been at the center of science for many years. It seeks answers to the questions of how people perceive the outside world. And the discoveries in psychology can actually help us in our daily work.
For example, some texts seem understandable, others not. Why?
Some graphics we can decode immediately, while others need more time. Same question…
This also applies to colors, but more on that in our example below.
An infographic can be explained as an explanatory graphic because it helps us to explain different things visually. In the corporate or marketing context, there are many different areas of application, for example…
- the explanation of product properties or presentation of your range of services.
- the illustration of business processes for the presentation to (potential) customers.
- the communication of new ideas to your colleagues (internal communication) – visually prepared in such a way that they quickly understand and can discuss.
- the documentation of your corporate strategy and the interpretation of individual tactical actions.
- for an (elevator) pitch where you convey as much (important) information as possible in the shortest possible time want to communicate time.
As diverse as we can use infographics, they are also as versatile in their effect and their benefits.
Of course, you should be clear about the goals you want to achieve with an infographic before production. This could be:
- Provide concrete information to the user
- Entertaining the user (whereby by definition an infographic would then rather be “infotainment”)
- Affect the user emotionally (if possible in a positive sense) in order to then move him to an action
- Attention to your brand (focus on appealing design)
- Drive (organic) traffic to your site, especially through image search or content platforms like Pinterest
- Generate Backlinks (Focus rather on the seeding of the infographic)
- Leads or even direct sales to generate
Furthermore, infographics and visual content is often shared on social media. This is much easier than with text content.
Only an infographic (i.e. an image file) is rarely enough. Or let’s say, you won’t be able to use the full potential of your infographic with this, because at the latest when your goal is to generate backlinks, you have to think about where these links should lead in the first place. An accompanying landing page or at least a blog article is absolutely necessary.
When seeding, you should make sure that the infographic is placed on a non-commercial page, such as the company blog or a specially designed content page, because multipliers react irritably if they discover an open advertising intention behind the graphic.
Wondering how to create your own infographic now?
How to create infographics
The first thing you need after defining your goal is information. You have to decide which ones are suitable for your purpose.
- Statistics & facts (market data, sales & turnover figures, survey results etc.)
- Connections and relationships (between people, products etc.)
- Processes (e.g. instructions, sequences of actions or similar)
- Geographic and socio-demographic data
- Chronology and history in the sense of the chronological sequence of events (in the form of timelines, calendars, etc.)
- Lists
You can ask yourself what associations colors evoke or how they affect emotions. These are key elements of a successful infographic to consider.
The effect of colors is based primarily on social and cultural traditions. Their perception is mostly related to the associations we store in our memory for each individual color.
Also relevant in this context: Colors in content & brand design (of course also contains a few infographics).
Tips for an effective infographic design
An infographic doesn’t have to be complicated. A meaningful headline, a logical information hierarchy and an appealing design are basically all you have to pay attention to.
In addition, it helps if the textual information is reduced to a minimum, but only if the entire infographic is self-explanatory:
- Text & Image are well balanced overall
- the data is well structured
- the information is not too specific to address a broad audience;
- you can tell a story through text and images that the user will automatically “scroll through”;
- the Data are as long-lasting as possible (“evergreen content”) so that the graphic does not lose its relevance over time
- the information offers a concrete practical benefit for the target group;
- the graphic is created in portrait format because that way it fits better in our stream (just think of Pinterest or user behavior on mobile Devices…).
We could probably expand this list as well, but I think you have enough starting points to start designing your own infographic.
And before you ask the question “Can I create an infographic online?”, here’s the answer: of course it’s possible!
That is there is no explicit infographic tool that covers all areas of application, but you can find an overview of suitable tools such as Infogr.am, Canva or Visual.ly here.
Closing words
The digital age has brought about significant changes in how the reader processes information and navigates the web.
“Continuous Partial” Attention is a type of human behavior in which the user is in constant search of multiple digital sources in order to have ever broader access to information. As a result, the user’s attention is divided into many smaller pieces.
One of the results of this online reality is the “Attention Economy ” – the interest of customers in information, which has become a kind of currency in the current web world. The user gets to know the content and invests his intellectual power to process the information. And then a decision is made as to whether it is worthwhile to continue to deal with the page content.
No wonder, then, that entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk have become successful with just that.
Your readers and customers are getting more and more information on the web. It is therefore very important to know how the perception of text (and images) differs online and offline. For example, we read much slower on a screen than in a book and our eyes tire much more quickly.
But we live in a digital environment. For many years, scientists have been dealing with the question of how users and the web interact. One of the results is the simple fact that we don’t like to read online. We therefore only read about 20% of the entire text on a website.
So that your visitors don’t lose interest in reading long texts and still get the core information about your products and services, I recommend using infographics. By using them, you attract significantly more attention via social media than with pure texts. They like to be shared and generate backlinks and a lot of organic traffic in general.