There’s no shortage of data, metrics, and useful pieces of business insights that can be found all across the internet, through work-related interactions, and generated by your own business activities. In fact, the sheer volume of data is staggering, and businesses are trying to find ways to ingest and use all the information that is coming their way.
One easy way is through using infographics. They take advantage of both text and visual content can present ideas in an innovative way to make them easy to synthesize. By crafting an eye-catching piece of visual data, your content can be easily consumed and can help to raise awareness, while also improving how your business communicates with your audience. That, in turn, will generate traffic and links to your website.
Why Infographics Matter
Before we dive into how to make them work for you, let’s look at why we need infographics in the first place. We’re living in an age where technology allows us to generate content at an exponential rate. In fact, over 1.5 billion pieces of content are generated every day, including 140 million tweets and 2 million videos. That translates to the equivalent of an average person reading 174 newspapers worth of information, every single day. All this can lead an individual to feel overwhelmed and bombarded with more information than they can process.
Hence, the pivot to a more visual style of information transfer; the infographic. By converting data into graphs, charts, maps, or visual stories, you’re condensing the information into an easily processed medium, that bodes well for your business and your knowledge base. The results speak for themselves:
- Between 2010 and 2012, search volumes of infographics increased by over 800%.
- Since 1990, the use of visualized information has increased by 400%
- Today, infographic production increases by 1% daily.
- On average, the traffic to a website increases by 12% after uploading an infographic.
- Over 87% of visitors end to read the text on an infographic.
- Infographics can enhance your business by 82% by creating brand awareness.
Given that, it makes you wonder why everyone isn’t using this format 24/7. There’s a reason
The Rise and Fall of Infographics
There’s a misconception in the marketing and business arena that infographics are a relic of a different time. To a certain degree, that may be true. Starting in 2012, the use of infographics really took off and everyone was using them. It was a visual time, and you could easily find a beautiful one to embed into your website or blog on almost every topic.
But by 2016, the world of infographics became saturated. Everyone was using them far too much, and they were of poor quality and were less about conveying useful information, and more about blatantly generating links. Other problems included sources and media outlets using and re-using the same formats consistently, with the same colour tones and graphics, and turning them into visual noise.
The problem was that during their heyday, infographics employed a format-first approach. It was about how they looked, and less about what they said. Thankfully, we’re smarter than that today, and know that building an engaging story using data and visuals, means that infographics can become a key pillar in your content marketing strategy.
The Benefits of Using Infographics in Your Content Strategy
1. The Human Brain can Process Visuals Better Than Text
The human brain is engineered to want to seek out and process visual content. In fact, over 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual, which is processed 60,000x faster in the brain, as compared to text. This means that visual information is more easily received; almost 40% of people find they have a better understanding of visual information as compared to plain text.
Hence, a well-designed infographic can share the desired information easily, and increase engagement.
2. Infographics Are a Great Way to Tell Visual Stories
There was a time where infographics were merely used to land links and offer snackable content. Now, it should be more of a story-first approach. By representing the most suitable form of content that works together and tells a cohesive narrative, while informing the reader, this method becomes a powerful content marketing tool.
3. Infographics Are Easy to Digest
Not everyone has the time to read a long (or even short, for that matter) blog. Some, don’t even want to. So there’s no reason why you can’t use infographics to supplement your content efforts. In fact, you can even use them to summarize your content and give it context. Using different forms of content together can drive engagement and provide consumption options to your target reader.
4. Infographics Are Linkable
One of the biggest benefits to infographic use is that they’re linkable, and can help a website with their backlinks. Think of it this way; if someone reading the infographic finds it useful and wants to utilize the information that it contains, there are 2 ways they can attribute you - a link to your site, or to embed the infographic itself on their website/social channels.
Either way, you earn links.
5. Infographics Can be Shared
Whether it’s on social media, between members of your team, or within blog posts and articles, this visual content is a great way to share information with others. It’s a well researched fact that most marketers use visual assets in their social media, and that tweets with images get 18% more retweets than tweets without images.
Therefore, always make sure your content is sharable with social buttons.
6. Infographics Can Help Establish You as an Expert
Some of the most respected names in business, marketing, social media, and SEO are all huge proponents of infographics. Due to how easy it is to share them and get links from them, with the right distribution channels and a visual display of useful information, someone could position themselves as a subject matter expert easily.
7. Infographics Can Help You Get Sales
Outside of conveying information quickly and visually, they can also serve as a great sales tool. An infographic can showcase what your product does and educate a potential client on your processes, benefits and comparables.
Clearly, there are a plethora of reasons why the Infographic needs to live again. They’re not obsolete, but misunderstood and misused. Applied to the right purpose and the right audience, and they can bring you valuable benefits in a contentment marketing campaign.
Take a look at some of the infographics we've generated at Aspiration Marketing, and feel free to embed these infographics with our codes below:
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