May 2, 2022
How Infographics Enhance Content Marketing Strategies
If infographics aren’t a part of your content marketing strategy, you could be missing out on some valuable digital marketing opportunities. Think about it, when you want to share information with someone, you tell them. When you want someone to retain that information, you provide a visual story or infographic to really drive the point home. In essence, an infographic is capable of summarizing large amounts of data in an aesthetically-pleasing way.
When done right, they can captivate readers in a way that words alone never could. For those concerned that infographics might be too dated to incorporate into modern digital marketing strategies, consider that 65% of the population are visual learners, and of the top 10 types of content used by B2B digital marketing agencies in 2020, infographics came in 7th, seeing a 67% increase in usage.
If you want to elevate your content marketing strategy beyond the standard text and graphic elements, infographics might just be the next logical step. Infographics can benefit your business in many ways. Here are the top seven benefits of incorporating infographics into your overall content marketing strategy.
1. Infographics Help Tell A Story
At their core, infographics help people understand complex concepts through visual aids like charts, graphs, or diagrams. Text and images can be used interchangeably to streamline the process, and they can be especially useful when integrated into articles or complex research materials.
That being said, if an infographic doesn’t provide any new information, it can be just as easy to tune the information out. The key is to strike a balance between compelling text and engaging visuals, mirroring the way the average person might read a book from start to finish. In other words, your infographics need to have a clearly defined structure, focus, and purpose with a clear start and end.
2. Infographics Can Enhance the Readability of Your Content
Apart from novels, most users aren’t fans of text-heavy content, and there’s a reason that most guides for website design and SEO optimization highlight the importance of balancing page text with the appropriate amount of white space and images. Because infographics are designed to convey a largely visual story, they can help enhance the readability of your content. Likewise, the rise of visual-heavy social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok highlight the impact of well-crafted visuals, especially when those visuals can align with your content objectives.
3. Infographics Make Your Content More Sharable
People love to share engaging content they find on their web journeys, especially through their favorite social media channels. The more people share your content, the more people are able to learn more about your brand, services, and products. Given that infographics make information easily digestible, plenty of brands use infographics to enhance the shareability of their content. The first and most obvious step is to set up some highly visible social share buttons. Similarly, you can add an embed code button or submit your infographics to sharing sites for more exposure. If your company publishes a monthly newsletter, these should also include any infographics you have on hand.
Likewise, you can include any company snapshots you’d like to share with current or potential customers, sharing specific sections across your social media channels, via your company blog, or in your press releases. If you want to take your social media marketing one step further, share your infographics with any of your partner influencers. Lastly, don’t be afraid to share your infographic more than once, as there’s no shame in trying to get more mileage out of the work you put in.
4. Infographics Can Help Improve the Decision-Making Process
Naturally, visuals can help the brain process information faster. With this in mind, it only makes sense that infographics can serve to speed up the decision-making process, even when dealing with complex information and concepts.
For example, let’s suppose you work for a manufacturing company that sells a number of spill containment berms along with several other products. While your target audience typically knows which product they need, you still get a fair number of calls from customers unsure as to which containment berm is right for them. Rather than inundate those customers with loads of information and technical manuals at once, you choose to make a decision-tree infographic to guide their customers through the buying process. This infographic features branching paths to the appropriate containment berm for their business or problem. Not only does this help speed up the decision-making process for each customer, but it also complements your conversion process, as this infographic can be placed at strategic points of the buyer journey to help drive sales.
5. Build Brand Authority and Credibility
To go along with the above, infographics are great tools to help build your brand credibility. When you take the time to create interesting and informative graphics to help people better understand your business and products, you position yourself as an expert in your industry, building trust and authority along the way.
Best of all, the process for building credible, talk-worthy infographics is pretty straightforward. You first pick a topic, something relevant to your business that’s share-worthy, then split your information into categories. This will help you to determine the overall size and layout of the finished product. Remember, your goal here isn’t to overcomplicate anything but present information clearly and concisely. You want to keep things focused rather than a jumble of facts and figures.
6. They Can Give Your Content a Boost in Exposure
Given that humans respond much more quickly to visuals, infographics provide an easy boost to brand and content exposure. This is especially true if you design your infographics to complement your overall content marketing strategy.
For instance, let’s suppose a fashion retailer decides to optimize its marketing strategy for the upcoming spring and summer seasons. Their marketing team knows they have some new swimsuit designs coming down the pipeline, so they try to think of creative ways to optimize their fashion digital marketing efforts. Of the ideas passed around, someone suggests an infographic to help potential clients choose their swimsuits based on their body type.
The idea is a hit, and the team gets to work creating the template. The finished result is a visually appealing “How to” guide on choosing the perfect swimsuit, complete with pictures of celebrities and influencers of each body type, descriptions of each type, and a list of suggested swimsuit designs. Not only is this design educational, but its simplicity complements the goal of an infographic to a T. As a result, the fashion retailer now has a new piece of marketing content that’s easy to read, easy to understand, and sharable across multiple channels.
7. Infographics Complement Your SEO Efforts
It’s no secret that Google loves content that seeks to offer a good page experience, as it’s a ranking signal. Because infographics are designed to connect to audiences in visually appealing ways, they naturally fall on the user-friendly side of the spectrum, enticing users to want to know more about your company or your products.
This makes infographics a valuable part of your overall SEO strategy, as they can complement a number of your marketing efforts along the way. As mentioned above, they can be included in your company emails to highlight important company information or promotions. Likewise, they can be sliced and diced for social media snippets, perfect for posting on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. Better still, a well-crafted infographic can provide multiple topics for future blog posts, with each section providing its own inspiration.
Let VELOX Media Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy
Most brands can only get so far through in-house efforts. If you want to take your content marketing strategy to the next level, reach out to the digital marketing experts at VELOX Media. As a Google Premier Partner with over 10 years of experience across a variety of industries, our world-class content team will work with you to capture your brand voice with rich, informative content that you can add to your company blog, distribute via newsletters, or use to increase engagement across your social media channels.