June 13, 2017

How to make effective infographics that tell a story?

Infographics have become one of the fastest growing tactics savvy visual marketers use today. In fact, the effectiveness rating for infographics rose more in one year than any other tactic—from 50 percent to 58 percent, according to the 2016 study by the Content Marketing Institute.

What’s in an Infographic?

We hear about infographics all the time in the digital marketing world, but unfortunately, many people are using the word incorrectly.

“An infographic is not a chart or a collection of graphs – it tells a story in a visual manner that makes difficult topics easier to digest for readers.”
-Brian Wallace

This particular type of visual storytelling can have a lot of benefits for brands in marketing campaigns by giving consumers content they want and building relationships instead of hard-selling.

There are several kinds of infographics:

Click to view entire infographic

1) Static infographics that start with an idea and then uses visuals and snippets of text to tell a story. A good example of that is the above infographic about the gig or freelance, economy which starts by talking about the growth in freelancing and ends with tips for freelancers to help them do well.

Click to view entire infographic

2) Interactive infographics like this one which explains where coffee comes from through a series of moving pictures and text that lead you through the process as you scroll down. It’s a fun way to get people interested in a topic, and content like this tends to get your company a lot of attention.

How to effectively distribute your infographics

Click to view entire infographic

Infographics tend to get shared a lot, not just on social media, but also through news stories relating to the topic. We recently had the above infographic get shared on over 100 different websites! When you create a high-quality, well-researched infographic you can share it with reporters as a news source that they can then use as a springboard for or complement to their next article on the topic.

To get started, follow these 3 tips

1. Value-first: You have to be careful here, however- creating an infographic that doesn’t contribute value to the conversation is likely to fall flat.
2. Make it useful to them: Focus instead on giving people something they can use instead of talking about your company’s latest whitepaper.
3. Avoid talking about your company: The objective is to get more eyes on your company, and the best way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to only talk about your company.

Want to Know More?

I’ll be talking about infographics and the marketing strategies surrounding them on a FREE live video on June 29th at 10:30 AM EST. Be sure to register – I’ll be chatting about the power of infographic marketing leveraging narrative visuals and you’re going to want to hear this.

Source: Visual Storytelling