We learn to recognize images before we learn to read. Visual storytelling through infographics offers an effective way to convey complex information in an engaging and easily digestible format. This article explores the benefits of infographics, best practices for creating them, and how to promote your visual content to maximize engagement. Additionally, we’ll provide examples of successful infographics and tips for crafting compelling visual stories.
Benefits of Infographics
Enhanced Engagement and Retention
We want to believe that if a piece of information is really important, we have the ability to focus, prioritize, and remember it forever. But what happens? We see a huge block of text and immediately start looking for any clues to boil it down for us, so we don't have to read the whole thing. Infographics combine visuals and text to create an engaging experience that captures attention, so they are more likely to be read and remembered compared to plain text. Instead of telling us the facts, they illustrate them for us to see. And studies have shown that people remember 80% of what they see and do, compared to just 20% of what they read.
Increased Social Sharing
Infographics are highly shareable on social media platforms, making them excellent tools for increasing your content’s reach and visibility. A bold (and often big) title signals to viewers the subject of the graphic right away, and the rest of the image can be reviewed quickly and shared in an instant. We have to say it: people share content that makes them look smart and fun to their friends, and infographics make information fun.
Better SEO Performance
What is true for individuals sharing on social is also true for companies: they want their brand to appear vibrant, helpful and knowledgeable in their industry. Infographics can show people how technically complex issues (defined by data and statistics) can have real-world outcomes, affecting human lives. They tick all the boxes for brands promoting themselves as well! Any traffic to your website or backlinks from brands using your infographics will improve your site's SEO performance. Search engines favor content that is frequently shared and linked to by other websites.
Best Practices for Creating Infographics
Understanding Your Audience
Before creating an infographic, it’s crucial to understand your audience. Know their interests, preferences, and the type of information they find valuable. It is crucial to accurately appraise how familiar your audience is with the body of knowledge you're wanting to illuminate for them. An infographic should deepen their understanding or give them a new perspective, not talk down to them, state the obvious, or confuse them.
Selecting a Compelling Topic
Choose a topic that resonates with your audience and is relevant to your niche. What makes a topic compelling is its power to prove to your audience that they will be benefiting themselves by taking the action you want them to take. And the graphic should be helpful by itself: ensure it provides value and addresses specific needs or questions.
Structuring the Infographic
A well-structured infographic guides the viewer through the information, allowing the eye freedom of movement while also facilitating the journey.
- Introduction: Start with a brief introduction that outlines the topic and sets the context. And we do mean brief– the images should be doing the heavy lifting here!
- Main Content Sections: Break down the information into clear, digestible sections. Label graphics and identify units of measure when necessary. When using copy as an image, remember that most Western readers still read from top-to-bottom, left-to-right– this rule can sometimes be bent but not always broken.
- Conclusion or Call-to-Action: End with a summary or a call-to-action that encourages further engagement. If the infographic performs a marketing function and isn't just to educate, then all the information you've provided should be supporting or encouraging the viewer to hold a belief, or awaken them to a need and your brand 's capacity to deliver a solution. Invite the viewer to take the next step in the process, even if a purchase is several steps down the road.
Design Tips
- Using a Clean and Consistent Design: Consistency keeps the viewer's focus on the information. A mismatched visual style or a random texture that only occurs once in your design will draw attention away from the whole, making the viewer wonder why it's there. So select a visual "vocabulary" and stick with it. This actually makes your job easier: using a limited number of fonts, just enough colors to separate the information, and balancing spaces of rest with the "active" areas of the graphs paces your viewer through the graphic and keeps the focus where you want it.
- Choosing the Right Color Scheme: Use colors that align with your brand and are visually appealing. There are many color palette creation tools available online you can use to inject some variety to your color usage, or to expand on the two or three brand colors your company already uses. A balance of contrasting and complimentary colors can give you the tools you need to differentiate pieces of information from each other, and add visual emphasis ("pops" of color) where it's needed.
- Incorporating Visuals and Icons: Use relevant visuals and icons to enhance the information and make it easier to understand. Visual plays on words can be achieved by employing imagery from your own industry in your graphs, or using elements from your target audience's daily life to illustrate percentages or quantities. Ask yourself, "What would my audience enjoy seeing in this graphic? Can I visually 'call back' to their lives and make this information more entertaining?"
- Ensuring Readability and Accessibility: An infographic can be bold and even challenging, but it serves no one's purpose if it is confusing, impossible to understand, or just not readable. Use legible fonts and sizes. Ensure your infographic is accessible to people with visual impairments by including alt text for images.
Tools for Creating Infographics
- Canva: A user-friendly web-based design app that has grown into offering a wide array of content types, Canva's pre-designed infographic templates make getting started easy. The templates don't offer complete autonomy to change anything you want, but this structure can prevent "design messes" and keep your information clear.
- Piktochart: Offers a starting framework for nearly kind of graph you can think of. Infographics are where Piktochart began, though their offerings have expanded into reports, brochures, and other marketing and presentation materials. You can still find a large variety of infographic material to choose from.
- Adobe Illustrator: When you're needing a truly custom graphic, Adobe Illustrator is one of the most robust, comprehensive design tools for creating shape-based images. Illustrator comes equipped with graph-building tools– choose your graph type, input your values, and a pie chart or bar graph instantly appears. The Adobe Stock library also offers pre-built graphics that can serve as starting points for your graphs, to be organized into larger compositions.
Promoting Your Infographics
Sharing on Social Media
Post your infographic on all your social media channels. An impressive blend of relevance (the information is useful and helpful) and fun (the graphics present the information in a novel, surprising, refreshing, or even alarming way) makes for material that people want to share. Delight your audience, and they will want to delight their friends. Use relevant hashtags and engage with users who share or comment on your post.
Embedding in Blog Posts and Articles
Integrate your infographic into related blog posts and articles to provide visual interest and enhance the text content. The written word and the illustration form a synergistic relationship: the article copy can provide a context and explanation for the topic, while the graphic can summarize the information by encapsulating it in a memorable visual memory.
Utilizing Email Marketing
Include infographics in your email newsletters to make them more visually appealing and engaging for your subscribers. Some color and clever imagery provides a welcome break to uninterrupted blocks of text. Everyone's inbox is buried under mountains of bland, boring email solicitations, so well-placed graphics cause even the busiest among us to pause for a moment before we send the message to the trash!
Submitting to Infographic Directories
Submit your infographic to directories like Infographic Journal and Infographics Archive to increase its visibility and reach a broader audience. If your infographic has the potential to stand out– and stand on its own– then people browsing these directories may be impressed with your presentation and seek you out, to see what else your brand is up to. And most directories will give you the chance to link back to your own webpage, giving your site a bump in domain authority and improving its search rank.
Collaborating with Influencers
Partner with influencers in your niche to share your infographic. Thought leaders in your industry are in many ways just like you: they appreciate a clever presentation of information that would otherwise be tedious or overwhelming. Showing an infographic will make their lives easier, and as a matter of professional (and sometimes legal) ethics your brand should be credited as the graphic's source. This can significantly increase its reach and credibility.
Examples of Successful Infographics
Case Study: "The Loudest (and Quietest) Places to Sleep in America"
Although many infographics display a collection of statistics, the best ones focus all those metrics into painting one cohesive picture. Mattress research service NapLab created this infographic to help their audience wrap their head around one thing: the amount of noise Americans are exposed to while they sleep. A large map dotted with bullhorns shows the areas of greatest and least noise– the top 20 for each. These pins visually "call back" to the substance of the topic. Then a bar chart compares the noise levels in both categories, and the bars are made of sound waves! The entire color palette is cool in temperature, even the oranges and golds, creating coherence while also providing bright punctuations of color on a mostly dark background.
Several data sets are presented to solidify the context: the population of each county, the most populous city there, and the number and percentage of people that are exposed to a disruptive level of noise. Naplab's measurement methodology is briefly and clearly explained, all in a compact format that uses the bottom half of the graphic's space efficiently and puts all these statistics in easy-to-find locations.
Case Study: "The Most Playful Cities in the United States"
This infographic made by AAA State of Play ranks the fifty most populous cities in the United States based on a host of factors contributing to the city's capacity for recreation, movement, and leisure activity. The country map at the top of the graphic quickly clues the viewer into the top ten, with yellow smiley faces of decreasing size visually ranking the top spot down to the tenth. Flat shapes and bright, primary colors evoke a youthful, carefree feeling that reflects the subject matter well.
After a brief description of the ranking method, each factor– the number of playgrounds, bike access, percentage of area that is park land, etc.– is illustrated and the cities that rank in the top five are listed for quick, easy viewing. Then an exhaustive list of all fifty cities gives the viewer as much detail as they're willing to gather, but sums up the cities' total scores in the far right column for easy comparison.
This graphic doesn't end with a call-to-action, but the data itself– and the awareness of access to play activities that the graphic brings to the public– is core to the AAA State of Play's mission, and could be useful in spurring sales of play equipment to low-ranking cities.
Lessons Learned from Successful Infographics
- Creativity and Clarity: Successful infographics combine creative design with clear, concise information. Aim high, see the information from your audience's perspective, and treat them like smart adults!
- Data-Driven Storytelling: Use accurate data to support your narrative and make it compelling. An infographic that misrepresents the data is worse than a creative failure– it's misleading, and your brand will lose credibility as a consequence. So treat the data carefully!
- Engagement and Interaction: Encourage viewers to interact with your content by including interactive elements or encouraging social sharing.
Tips for Creating Compelling Visual Content
- Telling a Story with Data: Use your data to tell a compelling story that resonates with your audience.
- Keeping It Concise and Focused: Avoid clutter by focusing on the most important information. A tiered approach to presenting the information, like the "Most Playful Cities" graphic above, can ease the viewer into the full body of content by giving them top-level takeaways first, then giving more detail.
- Using High-Quality Visuals and Concepts: Invest in high-quality visuals to enhance your infographic's appeal. Take the time to base your designs on solid ideas, and if you manage to imagine a truly unique concept that you can't show with a template, graphic designers can bring that concept to visual life.
- Including a Clear Call-to-Action: Encourage viewers to take action, whether it’s visiting your website, sharing the infographic, or contacting you for more information. Though not mandatory, a call-to-action is a helpful point in the right direction for your audience to actually benefit from the information you have shown.
- Testing and Iterating: Test different designs and content to see what works best. Use feedback to make improvements.
Conclusion
Infographics are a powerful tool for visual storytelling and can significantly enhance engagement with your content. By understanding your audience, choosing compelling topics, and following best practices for design and promotion, you can create infographics that captivate and inform. Embrace the power of visual storytelling to improve your digital marketing strategy and connect with your audience more effectively.
