Developing online content creation is an important marketing objective for almost any company in any industry. In fact, the goal today should really be on delivering the best content possible to really engage customers and drive sales. And one of the best tools available to marketers to accomplish this is still the infographic.
Indeed, marketers have been using infographics since at least 2010. The use of infographics goes back further than that though if you think about it. Remember picking up a copy of USA Today 20 years ago and seeing the colorful little graphic organizer in the lower corner on the front page of every section? When USA Today first began publishing in the early 80s it differentiated itself on the concept of providing carefully edited, bite–size information to its readers. They were apparently on to something, as the newspaper is still actually in print.
What infographics do so well is blend text and graphical elements to describe and show relationships in a small amount of space and time. They use colorful images, succinct text and a sense of movement to lead a visitor through a concept to a specific point or end result. Plus, probably most any topic can be turned into, or improved with, an infographic.
Research demonstrates this point as well. According to Hubspot, an infographic is up to 30 times more likely to be read than an article — and since it’s visual content, it’s also 34% more effective in persuading an audience in comparison to verbal presentations alone.
Because good marketing content is all about storytelling, deciding to develop an infographic will help you think through and compare statistics and data and how to present the information in small, digestible chunks based on the target audience you’ve identified. This is how you will create context for your marketing effort and ultimately make it more useful and memorable.
And let’s face it; everything indicates that attention spans are also just getting continually shorter. So a content piece that is simple and quick to read has a lot of value. Plus, here is a handful more reasons why infographics are a compelling way to market your message:
- They establish you as a thought leader in your industry
- Are social media friendly and easily sharable
- Attract new customers with easy-to-read information
- Provide a quick way to understand what could be a complicated topic
- Downloadable content that helps capture customer contact information
Cloud-based graphic tools help getting started creating your visual storystelling pretty easy. Here are four infographic creation tools on the market that you can begin using for free.
Canva @canva.com. They offer templates and elements in their library to help you design an infographic with relative ease.
Venngage @venngage.com. Offers easily configurable templates with simple visual elements like tree maps, bubble charts, and other shapes. Venngage also allows you to animate your infographic.
Visme @visme.co. Their basic plan is free and allows you limited access to data widgets and templates, which turn stats into great-looking graphs. You can do up to three projects for free and they can only be downloaded as a JPG or PNG.
Adobe Spark @spark.adobe.com., Infogr.am @infogr.am, and Easel.ly @easel.ly. These all have free offers to initially begin using. They do require an upgraded package to be able to replace their logo with your own logo. They handle charts well and also create social graphics, presentation images, maps, and web stories.
Upon completion, you’ll have to decide if you want to make your infographic downloadable and in doing so, want to request details from leads and customers. Providing a valuable infographic is just the sort of marketing tool that helps you capture emails and contact information to continue building more targeted campaigns in the future.
