How to Use Infographics to Engage with Your Online Audience

Infographics are a strong form of content to incorporate into your content marketing strategy. They are engaging for your readers, and if used properly, they can help communicate your messages better and drive additional traffic to your content. And brands are starting to catch on. IGW found that 56% of companies use infographics in some form in their content strategy. On top of that, 84% believed them to be effective.

Brands who know how to create infographics use them for marketing, sales, and internal communications. To begin implementing them into your strategy, here are some helpful tricks.

Find Content Prime for Infographic Form

An infographic is a unique way to add value to your blog content, especially if the content is easily transferable into that form. If you have content that is communicating your company’s research, findings, or work, an infographic is the perfect medium to make it visual. 

This doesn’t only apply to new articles either. If you already have an established blog with many articles, look at which posts have the most views. Consider adding an infographic to make them more engaging and continue to drive traffic. 

What Makes a Good Infographic

Infographics are a combination of information and graphics. Which means you want to focus on both the quality of information you’re providing and how you’re laying out the images to best present the information. To ensure you’re creating the most engaging content possible, follow these tips for infographics.

• Tell a story – The point of an infographic is to offer information in a more digestible manner than reading it in bullet points on the page. To do this, create a narrative as you structure your infographic. Guide someone through the information as if you were explaining how to understand the topic step by step.
• Have a mixture of images and words – Don’t just take what you were going to write in an article and throw it into an infographic style. Play with the format. Use different mixtures of images and words until you find the right balance between the two. If you’re struggling to find the right mix, try laying down all the images and icons you want to use first. Then go through and use short sentences to explain the transition from one image to the next.
• Use interesting data points – Nobody wants to read an infographic with redundant or obvious information. Instead, use infographics as an opportunity to wow your audience with interesting facts. Did you know a snail could sleep for three years? That’s 26,280 hours of naptime! Wow! These are the kind of shocking data points you should be aiming for whether you’re in digital marketing, computer software, or financial advising.
• Present information in a logical flow – Once you’ve gathered all your exciting statistics and facts, you have to share it with your audience in a way that flows. Don’t just throw them all in a random order. Be deliberate with your text and images in a way that allows for each statistic to stand out. Do this from the setup to the closing statement for a clear, concise infographic.
• Include a call to action – In order to capitalize on an infographic’s potential, always include a call to action. The call to action is the statement that tells your reader what to do next. Do you want them to look deeper into your website, or do you want them to sign up for a newsletter? Whatever the call to action is, include it in the infographic.
• Keep the theme to your brand – Is your blog personal and funny? If so, mix comedic stats next to serious stats. Do you use short sentences and small paragraphs to keep the blog readable and light? Keep that same flow with your infographic. Whatever style you use for your blog, apply it to your infographic as well. Also, try using the same font and color scheme as the rest of your blog to keep everything consistent.
• Use unique ways to communicate information – Infographics are already a unique way of communicating information. You can double down on this by infusing your infographic with timelines, maps, or creative graphs. Try to find new ways to demonstrate information to keep your graphics captivating.
• Use a creative background – Having a quality background can be the difference between an average infographic and a viral image. If you’re writing about rocket engines or NASA, you could make the top of the background space-themed, and as you travel down the infographic, you move through the atmosphere and back onto earth. Whatever the theme of your graphic is, let the background enhance it.
• Cite your sources – Don’t steal information online and then try to pawn it off as your own. This will create distrust between you and your audience. Instead, include a list of sources below or at the bottom of the infographic. This will give credit back to the institutions that helped you find all your information.

 Make it Shareable

Now that you know how to create great infographics, let your audience share them and use them as part of their blogs. Add share buttons for different social media channels and separate snippets of text to be individually tweeted or shared. Integrating this functionality on your blog or website will make sharing it accessible to your users.

Optimize Infographics for SEO

Because the infographic is going to be embedded into your blog, that means all those juicy factoids and data points are pretty much irrelevant from an SEO standpoint. To make sure you optimize the infographic for SEO, fill out these three details.

• File Name – Choose a file name that adequately sums up the entire infographic. This is crucial because search engines use the file name instead of the actual text on the infographic to determine what it is and how it’s relevant to searches.
• Meta Description – Most blogging sites will allow you to adjust the meta description of any image on your page. Typically, they will come with a character limit of around 160 characters. Try your best to include calls to action, keywords, and any other relevant information for the graphic. But only add them if they flow naturally. Never blatantly repeat twelve search keywords because this will tip off search engines.
• Alt Tag – The alt tag, otherwise known as the alt text, is the text that appears if the infographic fails to load properly. The alt tag is less about SEO and more about informing readers about what they’re supposed to be seeing. Avoid cramming a ton of keywords into the alt tag and leave that to the meta description.

Even though infographics don’t help boost SEO organic search as much as standard article text doesn’t mean it won’t help at all. SEO also ranks for how many times a blog is shared, favorited, or commented on. And it ranks by how much of the blog is read. All of these points are increased with a compelling infographic attached to them.

Ask for Feedback

Knowing how to make an infographic digestible and engaging is only half the battle. The next step is to make sure people will be able to follow your logic and understand what you’re trying to say. For this, you need to ask for feedback. A fresh pair of eyes on your infographic will help you determine how your audience will react. Depending on what feedback you receive, return to the list of tips above and see which areas you need to focus on.

Why Use Infographics?

People claim to have less time to sit and read an article nowadays. But it might not be the amount of time that’s changed. There’s physically more information streaming in on a day-to-day basis, making it harder to process it all. Researcher Martin Hilbert found that, compared to 1986, people receive over three times the amount of information each day.

This means people are skimming articles, glancing over headlines for news, and looking for a summarized version of the information. That makes infographics the perfect way to attract audiences to your blog.

• Infographics show expertise – Using a set of compiled data points and arranging them to fit an easy-to-follow narrative shows off your blog’s expertise. Plus, using infographics is a great way to capitalize on people’s search for summarized info.
• Easily digestible information – Using a combination of images and text makes what could otherwise be dense information, readable and understandable.
• Compelling and fun to read – By putting in a colorful background and tying the theme back to your brand, infographics can be fun to read. It turns statistics and raw data into compelling material.
• Capable of going viral – Because of their unique design and valuable information, infographics are simple to share, and they have the potential to go viral.

The Power of Infographics

Infographics are a great resource to make your content compelling and engaging for your audience. They can be used to tell a story with images and text creatively, and they can have icons draw attention to the important points of your post. By incorporating unique ways to communicate this information, audiences are likelier to share, comment, or continue reading your article. This is the power of including infographics into your content strategy.

Sources:

IGW. 2017 The State of Infographics. https://infographicworld.com/project/the-state-of-infographics-2017/

Royal Statistical Society. How much information is there in the “information society”? https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2012.00584.x