How and Why to Use and Optimize Infographics to Meet Your Content Marketing Goals
When it comes to creating an effective digital marketing strategy, there are several issues that you need to tend to. First, you need to develop your own voice and angle in order to become recognizable and relevant to your target audience.
Second, you need to diversify your content, not just in topics but in format as well. For a lot of content creators, this is a saving grace seeing as how it gives them an opportunity to recycle old content, thus prolonging its useful life.
On the other hand, each format has something unique to offer and here are the top five perks that you’ll get access to once you start using infographics to improve your content marketing campaign.
1. Improving your SEO
One of the first things that a great infographic can do for you is help improve your SEO efforts. The way this works is simple: first, you get higher traffic. A lot of people use the keyword infographic when typing in the keyword in the search box of their browser.
There are also a lot of people who go to the image section and look for visual content straight away. Here, an infographic has substantially higher chances of getting chosen. Other than this, an infographic has higher chances of retaining the audience somewhat longer. This is also a relevant SEO metric.
When writing their own posts, a lot of content creators love to link to infographics. This means that using infographics increases the number of potential backlinks that you will generate. Other than this, we’re living in a mobile world and the fact that infographics are extremely mobile-friendly means that it helps with your mobile SEO (and SEO in general) quite a bit.
Due to the fact that one of the core purposes of your content marketing strategy is to improve your SERP position, it is clear that going for infographics is always a great idea.
2. More efficient message
The next thing you need to take into consideration is the advantage of graphical data representation in infographics. What you need to remember is the fact that the more effective the message is, the more likely it is to cause a strong impact on the reader.
Humans are visual beings, due to the fact that our brain is capable of processing visual information 60,000 times faster than verbal. Therefore, it is your duty as a content marketer to give visual backup to any information that you want to convey.
One more thing you need to understand is that a lot of content creators make a mistake of digressing too much while writing posts. Why? Well, chances are that they are familiar with the fact that pieces of 3000+ words tend to be quite popular with search engines, which makes them try to artificially prolong their article.
This makes the content filled with fluff text and diminishes its value, in general. Seeing as how infographics are space-limited content pieces, you will have to be more efficient with your message, as well.
3. Integration in traditional marketing
The third thing you should focus on is the fact that infographics are one of the few digital marketing mediums that could actually be transformed into an offline marketing technique. In fact, agencies like Infostarters provide infographics that can, later on, be printed as brochures.
This type of distributable printed material helps the brand reach audiences that they would otherwise have no access to. At the very least, it can make you appear omnipresent.
As for the effectiveness of brochures, you see, the truth is that 7 out of 10 visitors pick up brochures from a display. This is a major boon to your marketing, provided that you have a brick and mortar business to display them at.
Second, about 95 percent of people become aware of a business after picking up a brochure (something that we’ll return to, later on). Lastly, as much as 80 percent of people will actually consider visiting you after they pick up your brochure.
4. Increasing your reach
One of the most relevant traits of a content type is just how shareable it is. When it comes to this, infographics are at the very top of the list. First of all, in order to understand why this is so, you need to understand why people share content, to begin with.
When a person shares, they often want to give people a better sense of what they care about. Seeing as how infographics usually focus on the most relevant statistic on a certain topic, such a thing is not that hard to envision.
Another reason behind this is in order to connect with those who share their interests and it is not uncommon for fans of a brand to form a community.
Keep in mind that the reasons behind sharing differ from one person to another. For instance, an altruist is looking for a way to help others (by educating them on a certain topic) while a careerist uses this to relate to like-minded professionals.
Regardless of their motivation, it is more than clear that infographics give them enough material to reach these goals of theirs which should be a reason enough for your brand to start using them, on its own.
5. Increasing brand awareness
The next thing worth mentioning is the topic of brand recognition and brand awareness. You see, the basic difference between these two phenomena is that brand recognition requires your audience to merely be acquainted with the existence of your brand.
It is determined by their ability to tell you apart from others. It also requires them to recognize your brand name, your logo, etc. On the other hand, brand awareness requires them to possess a certain amount of in-depth knowledge regarding your brand. When it comes to this, it’s really quite hard to match the effectiveness of a well-designed infographic.
Conclusion
The very last thing worth keeping in mind is the fact that using and optimizing infographics isn’t necessarily a simple thing. It takes a lot of practice and it’s more than obvious that designing an infographic requires far more technical skill and prowess than designing a traditional (text-based) piece of content.
Still, by just knowing how and why infographics benefit your brand as a whole, you’ll already provide yourself with good enough reasons and motivation to pull it off.