Sarah Quinn
Did you know that we remember 80% of what we see, yet only 20% of what we read? The power of visual content is hard to ignore.
And that’s why an infographic is such a valuable piece of content.
Not only is it one of most engaging ways to tell your story, but businesses who market with infographics actually gain on average 12% more traffic than those who don’t.
So what makes a good infographic? Well, you’re about to find out…
1. A Targeted Audience
As with any piece of content, if you want your infographic to be a success then you need to create one for your target audience. When coming up with the concept, do your research and find out what your audience likes, so that you can create an infographic that they will just have to share because it’s so on-point with their thoughts.
Think about it like this. Your target audience has a problem (otherwise you wouldn’t exist) and your job is to solve that problem. When coming up with concepts, your goal should be to show your audience that you are their solution, using the creativity of an infographic.
If you don’t have one, make sure you create a buyer persona so you know exactly who you are creating your infographic for.
Exclusive Bonus: Download an awesome template to help you create your own buyer persona today!
2. A Compelling Theme
If you check out the largest online community for infographics -Visual.ly – then you’ll see that each one comes with a different theme. Your theme is essentially your story and it needs to correlate with your brand, as your infographic will become another footprint in your content marketing journey.
If you check out this example below from Home Food Safety, you can see that they’ve really nailed their theme. The aim is to teach people the importance of cooking safety to help avoid food poisoning. Their theme is set within the various focus areas of the kitchen, and it really matches their brand too!
You can check out the full infographic here.
3. Actionable Data
Next step should be to find the right data for your infographic, and this should be a heavy focus throughout. Don’t just create one because you think it looks cool. For people to want to share it, it needs to feature stats that will back up your case.
The key here is to find stats that will help prove to your audience that your product or service is the solution that they need in their life.
As you can see from this snippet of one of our infographics below. As a video company, we’re looking to attract marketers who are interested in creating an explainer video, so we’ve used stats to show how powerful video can be.
You can check out the full infographic here.
4. Awesome Graphics
This is an obvious point to make, but your infographic has to look good! The graphics you use within it will help guide the viewer through the story, and if you haven’t put much effort into it then you’ll never see any shares. If you don’t have an in-house design team then think about outsourcing your infographic, because this is too important not to get right.
Some of our top tips from our infographic designers include:
- Keep your graphics simple
- Tell your story in sections so it flows
- Don’t use too many colors
- Make it readable
- Match up your visuals with data
- Stay true to your brand
- Don’t be too repetitive
This infographic below is a great example of simple graphics split into sections to effectively tell the story…
You can check out the full infographic here.
5. Powerful Copy
Yep that’s right, it’s not all about how it looks. The copy on your infographic is just as important! We’re not saying make it copy-heavy but If you want to share it on social then you need to come up with powerful headlines to really convey the message.
Your headline needs to be strong so that people will be compelled to share it. Keep it simple, concise and relevant to the theme. Quite like blog posts, a great way to grab attention and invite people to check out your infographic is to create a ‘how-to’ headline or one that asks a question.
Here’s an example of one that we created with the headline: How much do average apps make?
You can check out the full infographic here.
What’s Next?
So once you’ve put together your infographic with all of the above points in mind, the next step is to start outreaching.
Sure you can promote it on your social, but if you really want to make it go viral then you need to put the effort in. There are plenty of bloggers and influencers out there who will be looking for an infographic just like yours, so start putting a strategy in place to contact them and see if they will feature it on their site.
Exclusive Bonus: Download a two page checklist to guide you through the steps required to increase your content marketing reach!
Do you Like Content Marketing as Much as We Do?
It’s true, we love content. But what we don’t love is the same old stats that we have to use within our content.
We are looking for fellow content marketers to let us know what the future holds for content markting.
How do you use content? Which brands are getting it right? How successful is your content?
Enter our survey today and tell us all about it!
We’ll even share the results with you so you can use it in your own content.