Every content marketer should have a heavily stocked toolkit. Simply churning out blog after whitepaper after blog is not a sustainable way to build an audience. An infographic can be one of the most effective ways to add variety and depth to your content output. But it’s not as simple as throwing a few stats at a cartoon and flinging it onto your blog. There are vital elements that should be included in every infographic, to ensure it has the impact you’re looking for.
This week, we were sent a B2B social media marketing infographic that perfectly illustrates the factors required to make a great whitepaper. Let’s take a closer look at each element and how this infographic ticks the required (multicolored) boxes.
Infographics used to be an exciting and innovative additions to content marketing output. Over time, they have become regular fixtures for many brands, but they still have the ability to grab attention. The way to do that is to use a large, unique, signature image. An image that makes your graphic instantly recognizable.
This infograph provides the perfect example of the stark main image. The man pouring over his laptop that heads the piece is distinctive, easily-relatable to the material and instantly recognizable.
Alongside the stark imagery, a strong infographic should be bright, colorful and interesting to look at. The whole point is to present information in a visually pleasing manner, if you don’t do that you might as well just upload a list of stats in Microsoft Word.
Once again, this example fits the bill with a great mixture of yellows, reds, greens and blues running through the business-focused information.
Having a wide variety of colors is great, but you have to be careful to avoid a mess of thrown together images. Your infographic still needs to feel like a single, cohesive piece of content. In our example, there are plenty of elements dotted throughout the image to tie it all together. Images of laptops and desks are repeated over and over. With just enough subtle changes to keep it interesting.
Another way to avoid creating an infographic that looks like a fight between an 80s graphic novel and a calculus exam is to apply a natural structure. By pulling the information into sections, you make it easy for the reader/viewer to understand what they’re seeing and choose the sections that are most important to them. Here we have clear sections relating to social media usage, statistics on social marketing & sales, social media analytics and future predictions.
The images themselves are used well here too. Imagery is used to literally illustrate the statistics rather than just make them look pretty. This is vital in creating an effective infographic. Without illustrative images, it’s just a list of pictures and numbers.
However, that doesn’t mean that a little extra text isn’t useful too. This infographic uses a combination of expositive text and illustrative images to help you get a clear message about the future and value of social media. All the while achieving one of the key goals of an infographic, it keeps it interesting.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld (best sitcom ever kids, look for it on outdated DVDs or help me with my Netflix letter-writing campaign) that talks about the most important factor in stand-up comedy, going out on a high. The idea is that you leave the crowd while they’re laughing so they’re left wanting more. In the episode, George tries to apply the theory to his day to day life and it’s definitely a rule you can apply to infographics. This example finishes with an interesting and illustrative image that uses shadows to illustrate potential increases in social media usage. It’s the ideal finish to an effective infographic.
These factors provide a great structure for an effective infographic. The next step is to remember that there are no boring statistics, just boring infographics. Alright, that’s it for me…
An infographic is a great way to interest a reader, and create engaging content. To help you with this, we have created a free Engaging Content in 20 Questions whitepaper!
