Infographics are an important part of any well-rounded content strategy. It doesn’t matter what type of information you want to share; an infographic is a great way to do it.
Everyone’s brains are wired to learn things differently. In reality, most people learn better if they have a combination of visual information (such as images), text, and interaction. That’s why most people use some sort of visual cues during a speech or presentation.
Exactly Why Infographics Work
We Are All Visual Beings
Most of the research available shows that people retain information better if they can get a visual picture of it in their mind. Infographics help develop that visual picture of data and makes it easier to understand and remember while connecting the imagery to the information.
Infographics Don’t Need To Be Explained
When an infographic is created correctly, there is no added explanation needed. Simply put, if you have to educate along with your infographic, you’re missing the entire point of using them. Infographics should stand on their own. They do the teaching for you by visually providing the relevant information and can be shared as-is without explanation. That’s why infographics are shared more often than any other medium on Pinterest.
Easy to Share on Social Networks
Because of their visual and compact nature, like most image-based information, they share better than text because they’re relevant and relatable. Most people won’t share a Facebook update that doesn’t involve an image or a video.
Quite honestly, people don’t want to read a long social media post. They want eye-catching graphics that sum up everything in a tightly condensed and easily consumable package.
Infographics Can Easily Go Viral
While infographics may not go as viral as the angry bathing cats, you need to keep in mind that all infographics, by their very existence, are niche specific. Whether it’s an infographic on recycling or dog grooming, it can more easily go viral within your industry because it’s so specific. An angry cat video may have millions of views, but those views are irrelevant. They aren’t making sales or generating leads. Your infographic on keto-friendly meals may only have a few thousand shares over six months, but if 10% of those shares signed up for your lead magnet… you added a few hundred subscribers to your list from just one infographic.
Data Shows Infographics Are More Engaging
Thanks to their carefully chosen images that are shrewdly connected to data and text, people find infographics extremely engaging. Some infographics are even interactive. It depends on how much you want to put into them, but they can make someone laugh, cry, or think depending on how the data is arranged. A single infographic can be shared on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter consistently for years – that’s some valuable passive traffic right there.
Infographics Make Reaching Your Target Audience Easy
Everyone creates audience personas. But the truth is, we usually have more than one persona per audience, and an infographic gives us the opportunity to reach more of this audience. As an example, if you have one product, but that product speaks to three pain points for a consumer, you can design three infographics that all target a specific issue.
They Really Do Build Brand Awareness
By adding your logo and URL to each of your infographics, you’ll not only spread awareness of your brand, but also boost your expertise status. Most infographics are data centered, so if you show you know your stuff, it helps your audience get to know your brand and can heavily increase your overall perceived authority for your niche.
Infographics Are Simple to Create Now
With all the tools out there to create infographics today, you don’t need to be a graphic designer or use expensive, hard-to-understand software to do it. In fact, if you have your data written out in front of you, you can produce a professional-quality infographic in twenty minutes or less.
They’re Super Shareworthy In Multiple Ways
Infographics can be put on a website via an embed code, shared directly on social media, emailed or printed out. They work in multiple ways, so they’re easy to share across all platforms.
An Infographic Landing Page Can Boost Your Site Traffic
When you put a watermark on your infographics and make sure your infographic has a landing page, you’ll get a lot more traffic to your website. More traffic means more sales and more leads.
Creating and sharing infographics should be part of your online marketing and branding building strategy. They’re easy to create. Even easier to share, and they automatically hyper-target your buyer personas. And, in the end, people just love them. But before you feel overwhelmed, read through the following examples of infographic use cases. Choose one and focus on it to get started. Then after it’s posted, come back to this article and pick another.
8 Examples of Great Uses of Infographics
An infographic that is well-designed will be easy to understand at a glance. The entire point of creating an infographic is to give the consumer a way to digest a lot of information quickly without the need of additional explanation.
Here are some examples of great uses of infographics.
Explain a Difficult Concept
There are some things that are just very difficult to understand when read without a pictorial demonstration. But when visualized, the mind understands it and the reader can move on to grasp more of what you’re trying to tell them.
Visualize Data-Rich Information
Anytime you have a lot of numbers, you should consider using an infographic format to display them. It makes it easier for people to digest quickly. For example, you can use an infographic to show in a graphic way formulas that students need to use often. Or you can pull data from a report to show it visually.
Educate and Inform on a Topic
Whether it’s baking or carpentry, a great way to educate and inform anyone on a topic is to include an infographic. When your audience pictures the information, they’re going to be more likely to remember it. And they’ll start to picture your logo and URL right along with it.
Build Brand Awareness
Have you been successful with your business? If so, you can create an infographic using the data that you have, such as your average return on investment for your clients, or how many five-star reviews you’ve received, or the average number of satisfied users you pulled last quarter. You can even feature your customers by including how many successful projects they’ve launched or completed in the last year.
Provide Inbound Links
When you create shareable infographics correctly, they’ll provide inbound links to your website. These types of links are useful to help attract more audience members from the people who shared it with their audience.
An Incredible Recruiting Tool
Need to fill a vacancy? Instead of a boring job ad, why not create a viral infographic that describes the perfect person for your position, so you can find just the right candidate. Include all the necessities such as starting pay scale, benefits, paid time off, extra surprising perks, etc.
Present Survey Data So It’s Shareworthy
If you conduct a survey among your customers or audience, a great way to present the results is via an infographic. That way, you can tell a pictorial story about the survey and help your audience reach the right conclusions.
Create How-To Information
If you want to teach your audience to do something, why not create an infographic that explains how to do it. You can do a lot of things, from how to finish wood, how to create homemade eco-friendly green products, or how to make prohibition era cocktails.
Since infographics are about 30 times more likely to be read and looked at by your audience over text-based articles, it makes sense to include them as part of your content strategy. But don’t merely replace data-centric articles with infographics. That could tank your website’s SEO and search rankings. Instead, incorporate each infographic into your articles to enhance their social shares, increase multi-platform engagement and better demonstrate difficult concepts.
