Content marketing continues to be more “image-centric,” which is why an infographic is often the best way to visualize any data set and engage your target audience in a conversation about your message. It could be as simple as liking it, sharing it, or starting a discussion about it in their community. You get the buzz going for your content and enables you to visually present content so it is effective and not lost in an Excel “eye chart” so small it is not readable. You are looking for a way to stand out among your competition. And if your infographic is widely distributed via website traffic, social shares, backlinks, and more, then you have a strong case that its ROI proves it to be a great content marketing asset.
So, are you worried you might not have the budget to design an infographic? Or, creating one on your own might beyond your skill set? It is not. It is easier than you think. In his article this month, Mike Parkinson offers a great step-by-step tutorial on how to create an infographic in PowerPoint. He has a great tip, suggesting you follow the link to get Piktochart’s “20 Websites You Should Leverage to Promote Your Infographic.
Before you start designing and creating your infographic, you should create a social marketing plan that will maximize the number of impressions your infographic gets. Having it trending amongst social media targets will increase its visibility and see it trending. So how do we get there?
Do your homework. Spend time before you create your infographic to understand what your target audience likes. Is there a topic or a style of an infographic that seems to work better than others? Your content may be different but you want to appeal to your target audience.
Know your Data and its value to your audience. This is critical – your data must be relevant and actionable. If your audience doesn’t perceive that the data you are sharing has value to them, then they won’t share it. An infographic is a great way to tell your data story and control how it is presented.
Source: Business.com
Be creative. Use out-of-the-box ideas to design a memorable theme for your infographic. Find a fun, innovative graphic to illustrate your information. You want to create that “aha” moment with your final infographic. Unusual facts such as (insert infographic themes). The best infographic designs are ones that are laser-focused on giving the audience what they need. Don’t be too generic for an infographic. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you want high-interest, high-value leads from your target audience. Remember that you are competing for people’s attention amongst a crowded and overwhelming digital world. When designing a persuasive infographic, tell your data story with the most important information first to get their attention. The litmus test for your information is to think about from your audience’s perspective. Can you answer: What is in it for them? If your information passes this test, you are moving in the right direction.
Be social and smart about it. Create a social marketing plan before you create your graphic. Mike’s advice on chunking your graphics is a great way to think about how you could use it for your social marketing. Let me explain. Your infographic is built on key messages. You can reuse and redistribute your infographic as one image or a series of images. For example, in the “Whistle While You Work” infographic, you can see that there are five key messages. You can focus on each one as a topic and do social marketing around each topic on this infographic.
By using each section as well as the whole infographic, you are gaining multiple impressions of your data. Chunking each section gives you a snapshot of each of your key facts. You link it back to the complete infographic which you have explained in your matching blog!
Check out this infographic from Feldman Creative. They use each letter in the word, HEADLINE in their YOUR CHEAT SHEET FOR WRITING HEADLINES. It is clever and very marketable as a complete infographic and focusing on the content of each letter.
Social Marketing Tips to Promote Your Infographic
- Share it each one on social media.
- Send it out at multiple times using hashtags and multiple channels.
- Create a blog that tells the story of the infographic and allows readers to share it.
- If you use an expert in this field, then use their social network to expand the reach of your information to their network.
- Use the aggregators that you find on Piktochart’s “20 Websites You Should Leverage to Promote Your Infographic.
- Use the right tags for Social media so your infographic is widely distributed.
Checkout http://hashtagify.me/.
Think of it as your Twitter Hashtag search engine – they have both a free and a pro version. You can identify the value of a hashtag by searching to see how it is used. They have both a free and a pro version. Is it is trending? Are any of your industry influencers or target market using it?
Let’s do a search using #presentations. And look who we found: Nolan Haims and the Presentation Guild.
In the pro version of Hashtagify, you have a great analytics dashboard. This gives you actionable results on the impact of your hashtag campaign.
Now you have the power of knowledge and resources to create an infographic on your own using PowerPoint and now you know what to do with it so have fun. Let us know your hashtag and we will social share it.
