How you can use infographics to publish interactive content for your audience

Our brains crave infographics. At least, that is what is outlined on this page at Neomam.

They give thirteen reasons, and they do it in, you guessed it, an infographic format. The page is pretty slick with moving elements, and the entire page looks like an infographic.

According to Forbes contributor Cheryl Conner, infographics are still thriving. Writing about the data from a study, she summarizes,

In summary, then, any marketer with a story to tell or a product to promote can likely tell it better with an infographic that can bring the information alive. More than ever before, the visual aspects of well-crated infographs can make data memorable and understandable in a way that few other forms of media can.

So, why create an infographic? I mean, infographics are not generated using automation. Not at all. It takes some time to churn one of those out.

Robert Katai shares three reasons he thinks it is worth making an infographic. First, he says, it helps “grow your brand position.”

He says, “I believe that publishing an infographic with some great insights, can help you establish a better branding experience in your customers’ eyes.”

It takes a consistent effort and builds that experience over time.

Second, Katai says, infographics help you get backlinks, but not just any backlinks, but high-quality backlinks. It takes time to build relationships with the right bloggers, but when you create something relevant, the infographic can really be helpful, get more exposure, and develop high-quality backlinks for your website.

Finally, Katai says it can help with social media exposure. Some social media platforms are made for easy sharing. Katai mentions Pinterest and Slideshare. Create a quality infographic with great content, sources and professional design and it can help you get more shares on social media as well.

Getting started and research

There are many articles about creating an infographic, but there is much more to making an infographic than graphic design skills.

Nadya Khoja gives seven principles in an article at Content Marketing Institute. Some of these can be implemented by WordPress professionals as well. They include solving a burning problem, challenging the status quo, changing the perspective, finding the origin stories (think Steve Jobs), use extreme cases, stepping outside your industry, and mashing up two or more topics.

The company where she works, Venngage, has an excellent step by step article written by Midori Nediger on how to make an infographic. Nediger doesn’t just focus on the graphics; she gives some useful information on the information needed to create the infographic. Venngage is an online graphic design software, so they provide templates in the article.

After defining your burning question (step one), she counsels us to use a question pyramid.  She explains,

These questions will become the framework around which you’ll build your infographic, and will help you tell a compelling story.

The supporting questions should reveal the basic information your audience will need to know to understand the main topic, and the probing questions that will reveal broader insights which should ultimately solve the burning problem.

The next step is collecting your data. Sometimes you work with existing data sets, but if not, she goes over different ways to gather the necessary data. She provides a list of data repositories you can use to find useful data.

Of course, there is always the biggest data repository, Google.

Software & Layouts

The next part of creating an infographic is choosing the software to design and the layout. Thankfully, there are various software-as-a-service platforms that will help with this process. The other option is to hire a graphic designer to take your information and idea and turn it into a design.

If you have a designer on your team, you can turn that part of the assignment over to him or her. They can use what they wish.

If you want to use software designed to create infographics for the rest of us, these are some tools you can take a look at using:

Canva

Piktochart

Venngage

Visua.ly

SmartDraw

Edraw

Infogram

Visme

You can find more options in this article at Forbes.

Wrapping it up

Sometimes we are looking for something different to add to our blogging and content marketing efforts. Using infographics can help in this process. Certainly, you can blog about other infographics, but even more, creating your own can help leverage your brand as an expert.

Infographics aren’t easy to turn out, but they are not impossible. With a little planning, a little help, and some persistence, you can create something beneficial for your community.

Have you ever published an infographic? How did it perform? Tell us in the comments below.