Infographics may seem like a simple format on the surface, but never forget that looks can be deceiving. If you truly want to craft better, more compelling Infographics that resonate with your target audience in a meaningful way, there are a few key tips and tricks you’ll want to explore.
Infographics Can Be Specific, Too
We’ve written at length in the past about how important specificity is in your marketing. These days, you can’t afford to try to craft a message that appeals to the largest group of people that it can. Instead, focus on developing a message that strikes a deep, meaningful chord with a small-yet-crucial group of people.
When you hear about how Infographics can easily go viral on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, it’s easy to forget that. After all, you’re talking about a document that may be shared among thousands of people in an afternoon – naturally, to get to that point the message needs to be pretty broad, right?
Not necessarily.
Start with not just your audience, but a specific subset of your audience, whenever you sit down with an Infographic maker like Visme(which I founded) to develop your next Infographic. Who are you trying to reach? What specific problems are they facing? How can you help them? How can you connect these questions with their answers via meaningful data points, stats, facts and figures?
These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself before creating any Infographic moving forward. Not only will this give you something to work towards and keep you focused, but it will also help you craft a document that reaches not just anybody in particular, but the right group of passionate followers who are already interested in what your brand has to say.
It’s All About That Flow
This is because the flow of that movie was totally off in a way that kept you disconnected for the entire time. Maybe you were getting hit with too much information too quickly and had a hard time keeping up. Maybe it felt like nothing happened and because of that, the narrative was wandering aimlessly. In any event, flow (or a lack thereof) ruined the experience for you – and this is absolutely something that can happen in your marketing collateral, too.
One of the most important keys to success in terms of Infographic design is and will always
Have you ever sat in a movie theater, watching a film, just waiting for it to end? Then, you look at your watch and realize that the running time was about two hours – which is a
This also happens in content like presentations. When you sit down with a presentation maker, you naturally think about each slide very carefully. Are there too many images? Not enough images? Is this slide overloaded with text? Are slides 8, 11 and 15 redundant with slide 5? The answers to all of these questions dictate flow and they’re very important to ask – so why should Infographics be any different?
Experiment with ideas like separation – group chunks of data into their own sections based on facts and figures that are thematically related to one another. Play with elements of your design that control the pace at which someone experiences the Infographic as a larger document. Think about the flow that your Infographic needs to have and then make a lot of design choices that support that intention. Not only will this create a better experience, but it’ll also help make sure that your Infographic is one that people actually finish and enjoy.
Broadcasting That Message
Finally, once your Infographic is complete, make sure that you’re getting it out into the world in a way that makes sense given the people you’re speaking to and where they’re located. The best Infographic in the world won’t do you any good if your audience can’t actually find it.
Sites like Respona and others are hugely valuable to that end, because they act as an all-in-one search, outreach and engagement platform that is perfect for resonating with your target audience. Not only can you find top journalists in your industry or other thought influencers and people to partner with, but they also let you build quality backlinks to your Infographics so that you can gain more organic traffic than ever before.
At that point, you’ve got the perfect approach to creating Infographics and the perfect way to get them out into the world. All that is left to do is actually craft the type of content that people can’t get enough of.
About the Author
Payman Taei is the founder of Visme, an easy-to-use online tool to create engaging presentations, infographics, and other forms of visual content. He is also the founder of HindSite Interactive, an award-winning Maryland digital agency specializing in website design, user experience and web app development.