Looking to increase new business leads? Create memorable and engaging content for your audience by adding infographic content marketing to your digital strategy.
The average human attention span lasts about eight seconds, which means you’re most likely to either captivate or lose readers in the first paragraph of your marketing content. Even then, the readers you do keep may only remember a fraction of what you wrote. According to a study by iScribblers, people remember about 20 percent of what they read. To help fill the memory gaps, add infographic content marketing to your digital marketing toolbox.
How Infographics Can Help Engage Your Audience
Infographics engage your audience by drawing their attention to the most important information you want them to retain. Replacing text with infographics allows you to get straight to the point by clearly illustrating statistical information and reducing your word count in the process.
While the same information can be presented in text or a table, infographics are more effective at breaking down difficult concepts and helping readers visualize a process, timeline, or data trend. Plus, your audience is more likely to remember visuals over text, making infographics a worthwhile investment in your content marketing strategy.
Venngage for Business
At Parallel Interactive, we create infographics with a user-friendly, cost-effective developer tool, Venngage for Business. Perfectly suited for a busy content marketing agency like ours, Venngage’s innovative tools help us to create and edit infographics on time and on budget. By including infographics in our own content marketing strategy, both new and repurposed content is more relevant, memorable, and engaging.
Venngage also gives us the ability to make our infographics interactive, setting our content marketing strategy apart from competitors. This distinction improves visitor engagement on our site and social media, increases conversion rates, and attracts new business leads.
Pro Tip: Venngage’s interactive and responsive functionalities allow you to make edits in the platform that instantly update your infographics in real-time with embedded HTML scripts. However, we’ve found that downloading our graphics as HD PNG image files to use on our website actually increases page speed.
If your infographic is an image, make sure the file name and alt text are optimized for search using your long-tail keywords and titles. We also recommend keeping image file sizes under 300 KB.
Infographic Content Marketing Best Practices
Infographics can increase web traffic by up to 12 percent and are shared three times more than any other type of content. Search Engine Journal breaks down the best ways to create engaging infographics to boost business leads and conversion rates. Here are our top infographic content marketing best practices:
1. Define Your Audience
Clearly defining your target audience will help you create the best content and share the most meaningful information. You can also conduct market research to identify topics and concepts that your specific audience is interested in.
2. Focus on Your Data
While many people focus on the graphic part, it’s just as important to focus on the info part. Knowing what data will support your infographic will help you craft a better story. You can pull information from online research or case studies you’ve conducted. Start by focusing on the data, then create graphics using up-to-date information to keep your content fresh and interesting.
3. Determine the Best Infographic Style to Lay Out Your Content
Although your research is important, your content is what will keep audiences engaged. You must share information that your audience can’t find anywhere else and visualize the content in a way that makes sense. Include images and icons to enhance your data points and provide more engaging content.
We also recommend looking at the different types of infographics to help you determine which will be the most impactful way to present your content. Knowing the style of infographic will also allow you to map out and execute a solid design based on the resources at hand. Once you’ve created layouts that work well for your content, you can even save them as templates on Venngage so you can continue creating infographics with your branded designs.
4. Create a Personalized Story
Much like a blog post, your infographic should have a compelling headline, introduction, body, and conclusion. It’s important to effectively introduce the concept, engage viewers with valuable content, and tie everything together at the end. Simply summarizing the data and making it look good isn’t going to cut it. You want to create content that’s going to keep readers engaged and graphics that are going to wow them.
5. Share It
Now that your infographic is complete, it’s time to put your content marketing strategy into action by generating traffic through SEO. Your infographic needs to be optimized for sharing on your website and social platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This can help you gain your audience’s attention as well as other industry thought leaders who are discussing similar  topics, helping you build backlinks and increase site traffic.
6. Measure Your Success
Don’t forget to measure the success of your infographic content marketing strategy. Whether you put your infographic on a blog post or email blast, you can track a link or button as the conversion point. You should also consider what your original goal was and what stage in the customer journey you may be targeting.
