Infographics and Their Impacts on Content Marketing

Infographics are a powerful way to deliver your message and improve engagement in your content, if you’re not using them, read this.

Infographics

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With more than 70% of conversions starting from search engines, content marketing strategies have become one of the most valuable elements in digital marketing efforts. Content marketing strategies often generate the most average ROI (2X) across all industries, despite their demand for long-term engagement. 

 

Content, even a few years ago, was mostly focused on blog posts and emails that were used to bring traffic in. But, as more and more users started taking their business online, demand for case studies, social media posts, and infographics increased significantly. Today, content influences most decision-making factors. 

 

Infographics had already been proven to be a great accessory to generic content. But, in recent times—apart from being used as a summary of the long articles—they’re being generated to fuel social media & email marketing campaigns and to build brand credibility

 

Whether due to increasing competition or reducing concentration span, infographics and videos have pivoted to become a central element from being a mere supporting component. In this article, we’ll discuss the impact of infographics on content marketing and how you can use them to grow your business. Before we start, here is an infographic, describing the types of infographics: 

Source: contentmarketing.io

 

 

Increased Engagement with Content

 

If you’re generating 300-word blog posts, infographics are mostly redundant. It already is concise enough to keep the users engaged with the content if it’s relevant. But, for long-form content, whitepaper, and case studies, where you may need to engage the users for a 30-page long ride, infographics are critical. 

 

Infographics offer impact points to the readers before they can dive into details. They make sure that the user is hooked enough to keep reading—searching for sneak peeks that have been given to them through the infographics. 

 

In most cases, beneath the desert of words that content is, infographics can prove to be the oasis. It allows the readers to refresh their memory and continue afresh. Moreover, if you can generate relevant infographics, the users may only focus on them alone without going through the details of the content—taking whatever is required. 

 

Moreover, once the visitor has invested enough time in your content, it makes them compelled to leave their details or buy from you. You also can develop gated content with infographics. Give your audience what they need as infographics, and gate the detailed content behind a lead-capturing wall. 

 

Potential for Faster Decision-Making

 

When harvesting information in written form, our brain typically makes an image of the same and analyzes the content. Infographics quicken the process by manifolds by directly feeding images to your audience. This makes it easier to understand the goal of the content and make decisions according to that. 

 

When presenting complex ideas, infographics are much more beneficial. For instance, if you’ve published an industry research report that contains complex information and interviews from various resources, it becomes incomprehensible to most readers. By including infographics giving away the highlights, even the most impatient of readers can comprehend the information—making a faster decision. 

 

Suppose you’re a marketer working for a car interior manufacturing company. While most of the customers know what they require, you still get a fair number of calls from customers unsure about which product to choose. 

 

Rather than making the customers more confused with information and manuals regarding the products, you can guide them through infographics with common issues and solutions. In addition to making it easier, you can facilitate a faster decision-making process.  

 

However, a faster negative decision isn’t what is intended. Make sure to place infographics at strategic points of the buyer’s journey where they may get confused. 

 

Increases Content Reach and Exposure

 

In the crowd of millions of content being published every day, you risk losing your relevance and exposure to competitors. Moreover, after you’ve spent significant resources researching relevant topics, if you can’t reach the intended audience, the efforts are deemed futile. 

 

Infographics are engaging, easy to consume, and comprehensible. In addition to helping you boost website traffic by at least 12%, they help you gain exposure to newer markets and prospects through content marketing. 

 

However, you need to be careful of certain elements when including infographics in content marketing. Such as 

  • Don’t congest one chart with too much information. Consider breaking down the infographics into categories that go along with each other. Don’t mix the statistics of social media trends with public relations, for instance. 
  • Surprise the readers. Be mindful of contradicting statistics. For instance, if your research determines that the average user likes getting your freemium services, but most of them upgrade to the second most premium option, it’s a surprising fact. Use it. 
  • Don’t make the chart itself complicated. Use as simple visuals as possible. Keep yourself to bar, pie, and line charts if needed. However, refrain from using dry numbers.

 

Making Content Understandable

 

Most content is developed to help or influence the readers. If incomprehensible, it negates the whole point of content marketing itself. Despite your best efforts, relying only on raw written content can bring demise to your business. You need something that unclutters the content and makes it understandable to even indifferent readers. 

 

Infographics are such elements. When you make the effort to visually represent the highlights of your content, in addition to increasing engagement, it makes the content much more understandable. Infographics increase your content acceptability and give you an edge over the competition. 

 

For example, suppose you’re a marketer in the mental health sector and your employer has made a groundbreaking discovery in human psychology. Expecting every patient or their caregivers to understand the research paper is impractical and futile. However, if you present the same information through infographics that are comprehensible to most of your prospects, it’s much more effective. 

 

Increased SEO Opportunities

 

Long gone are the days when you could cramp keywords in the content to make it rank higher. You also could take shady measures like hiding keywords in white font or in the HTML code to give the bot the wrong impression. But, that’s in the past. 

 

For now, to organically rank higher with your content, you must strive to help your audience. You may use keywords to improve your ranking, but not without limitations. Written content, although still the best to bring in traffic, isn’t often enough. You need to implement visuals and videos for greater search engine optimization (SEO). 

 

Visuals like infographics, adding to the engagement factor, make it easier for search engines to rank your content on other media channels like images and paid ads. By using infographics in your content, you get an opportunity to rank your content higher and spread it wider. 

 

Improved Social Media Shareability

 

What can you do to make your content more shareable on social media? First, you can implement a generic button allowing the users to share the links to their profiles. Second, you can let them share the visuals. In our experience, the first option has always been underwhelming and inefficient. However, the second option—if done right—can do wonders. 

 

Include as many infographics as possible in your content to improve social media shareability. Irrelevant visuals are almost similar to sharing links and no one bothers to know more about them. But infographics, on the other hand, are capable of intriguing the viewers and making them consume the content. 

 

Imagine being a social media user interested in HR software solutions. Coming across a link that promises to increase your revenue by 5x by using their solution seems toothless and sterile. However, if the same link was offered with a list of industries that had benefited from using HR solutions, you would be more compelled to click on it and find out. 

 

Complementing Brand Theme and Strategy

 

Any effective marketing strategy requires creating a consistent brand theme across all platforms. Content marketing is no different. You must maintain your brand theme and strategy throughout every content that you produce. 

 

For instance, if your brand content is known for being serious and data-backed, don’t divert from that for any one instance. Moreover, if your content is taken well by your audience, there’s no reason to do so. 

 

Infographics allow you to stay true to your content throughout the platforms. Consider keeping color schemes, visuals, and content consistent for your infographics. Carefully curated infographics can complement the brand theme and strategy quite effectively. 

 

Increased Brand Credibility

 

We’re wired weirdly. Most of us believe in images more than we do in written content. It may be related to visuals being seen by our own eyes and writings being deemed as a fortification of someone else’s perspective. 

 

Whatever it may be, visuals in the content increase brand credibility by a huge margin. Moreover, original graphics, including infographics, performed the best for marketers in 2021. Therefore, if you aren’t using infographics to enhance your content marketing strategy, you’re directly missing out on revenue. 

 

Use original research content for your infographics and try to keep the visuals consistent. If you’re looking for better engagement, don’t complicate and elongate the graphs through information overload. 

 

Consistent Integrated Marketing

 

Integrated marketing is the practice of unifying different promotional platforms to come up with a synchronized marketing network. It also can include the correlation between your sales and marketing team. Most prominent brands thrive on providing their best customer service and accessibility across various platforms. 

 

With more than 90% of buyers considering customer service as a decision-making factor, your content marketing strategy should also include integrated marketing. For that, you need to fall back on infographics. Sharing similar content on your websites, social media, and virtual events empowers the brand strategy and enables the prospects with unified communication channels. 

 

Faster Readability

 

When developing e-books or whitepapers, the pillars of words can deter the prospects from your landing page. Even if they might be interested in what you have to say, they aren’t here to read through a book to understand what you have to offer. Use infographics to strategically present your content in a concise manner that offers faster readability and comprehensibility. 

 

Moreover, as discussed before, faster readability may also mean faster decision-making. As your prospects are online, their reduced attention span demands visuals and quick information delivery. 

 

However, stay away from describing the technical aspects through infographics. Concentrate on why they should choose your product and leave the manufacturing and technical elements for a more attentive audience. 

 

Improved Content Tracking

 

It’s hard to track the traffic generated from content. Although follow-links and backlinks can be tracked, the number of prospects gaining interest from the content is quite tough to measure. By including infographics, you can directly keep track of which leads have clicked on which visuals. 

 

For instance, if two of your diverse social media posts are gaining a lot of traction, you can easily track which leads are coming from which one. By having extensive information on the interest of the leads, you can customize your communication strategy to drive them more into the sales funnel. 

 

Better Public Relations Strategy

 

Webinars, events, press releases, internal communications, social media communications, and everything that includes interacting with a live audience, are considered a public relations strategy. If you’re a brand that relies on referrals and recurring customers, public relations are an essential component of your digital marketing efforts. 

 

Content is a critical part of it. Without content, you won’t be able to convince your prospects about how well your products are performing, how you can make them more money, or how to make their lives easier. However, as it was done in the past, a public speaker presenting the charts and narrating them isn’t worthwhile anymore. Your audience seeks a visual representation of everything—from your products to your service. 

 

Apart from exceptional copywriting, infographics aid the efforts by engaging the audience in their visual journey. Consider developing infographics for every event that you may present to increase the impact of your statistics and modifications. 

 

The Bottom Line

 

Infographics are accessories of content that enhance their impact. It helps increase engagement with content and allows the readers to spend more time with your content. Although not directly, impactful infographics can potentially reduce the decision-making time for businesses. It also helps increase content reach and comprehensibility. SEO opportunities are also improved with infographics. For building a consistent brand theme, infographics are unparalleled. Moreover, as we trust visuals more than writing, infographics empower the brand with more credibility and better public relations.