Infographics: Tested and Proven

Infographics drive brand awareness, audience engagement, cross-web traffic and –ultimately– conversions, but they require thoughtful, strategic planning.

Designing attractive infographics that offer important statistics or insights in an attractive format keeps prospects on your website longer, inspires them to share your content and increases the chances that they’ll remember your brand. With the ubiquity of custom graphics capabilities, now more than ever it’s important for brands to have a results-driven strategy for visual content that sets them apart. Regardless of the company it serves, striking visuals drive success.

Building trust through content – Infographics are just one piece of the pie

As with any content format, there are no silver bullets for developing a brand identity through infographics. While infographics are an important part of a mature content marketing strategy, presenting information in several different formats (blogs, white papers, videos, etc) lets you cast the widest net (targeting multiple audiences based on what content resonates with them the most). Every company (and therefore every infographic that company produces) should have its own look that reflects corporate branding, subject matter and the desired emotional impact on viewers. Developing content for your website is essential for creating trust with your target audiences at different points in the sales funnel. More than ever, using branded content to build reliability is a competitive necessity, because without trust, it is unlikely that consumers would purchase from your company.

Creating content with content

When you pair some piece of content, like a blog post or an article, with an infographic that corresponds with the other content, it helps you further establish authority, as it provides readers with more content and information to nudge them toward a conversation. As with any content published, it’s imperative to have relevant calls-to-action (CTAs). Publishing an infographic with clear insights on what viewers should do next is key to driving results, no matter where traffic is coming from. Creation is only half the battle. After it’s done, you must spend as much effort promoting your content to make sure you’re maximizing your social channels to get as far of a reach as possible.

Our most popular infographic

Oneupweb has created tons of infographics throughout the years, and we continue to see the benefits–not only from our internal content marketing strategy, but for our clients as well. Our most popular infographic was the one below. It covers responsive website design and it has received thousands of views and shares to date. We attribute some of its success to its subject matter: it was a popular topic with information that our targeted audience needed to know. In addition, the design is visually interesting and the content easy to read, understand, and most of all remember.

Oneupweb’s best practices for infographic creation

1) Know your audience – create content that your audience actually wants. Using the same format will not work on all audiences. Understanding the persona of the customer is a major part of creating a successful infographic.

2) Titles are very important – Ideal title length is six words with a character count of less than 65 (otherwise it will be cut off in search engines). Make sure to include a keyword, make each title unique, relevant and powerful. Interesting adjectives, negative wording, numbers and personalizing help make titles “pop”.

3) Research well – Dig for data that is hard to get, but use that data to evoke emotion for the most impact. Use primary sources within your business or talk to your clients and consider tools or services for gathering feedback. The best infographics are made out of comparisons with bar graphs and pie charts.

4) Design Matters – Select the right color scheme, use readable fonts. The use of color, typography and structure make the piece engaging, like an abstract piece of art.

5) Tell a Story – Storytelling means knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you are saying, the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal.

6) Site Data Sources – Doing this gives credit to original articles and it lends credibility to your own content

7) Make it Sharable and promote it – add social sharing buttons and provide your audience with an HTML embed code – The first place an infographic should live is on your website or blog. You should also submit to places/sites that accept infographics, like visual.ly, which can create a tidal wave of visibility.

Want to learn more? Download our recent e-Book, Content Marketing Quest, to find best practices for other content pieces, such as white papers, email marketing, webinars and more!