5 Reasons You Should Create an Infographic

Every day, we are bombarded with information. In an average single 24 hour period, two million videos are created, more than 100 million tweets are posted, and over a billion new individual pieces of content appear. No matter who you are, that’s a lot to sort through, and even the most diligent and web-savvy information-seeker is only going to be able to peruse a tiny fraction of everything that’s out there.

 

For business owners and marketers, the difficulty is twofold – you want to leverage existing information that’s valuable to your clients and you want to get it in front of them in such a way that they sit up and take notice. When they’re done well, infographics accomplish both of these goals. And – as we’ve covered before on this blog – they can be created at a surprisingly small cost if you know what you’re doing.

 

Right there you have three reasons that your business should be using infographics, but below we’re going to add five more so that by the time you’re done reading this post, you’ll be chomping at the bit to create an amazing infographic for your company.

 

They make you look like an expert. One of the main strategies in content marketing is positioning your business as possessing expert knowledge in your particular area. Writing blogs on this area helps to build up your credibility, but few things say “expert” more than a well-designed and informative infographic that pulls facts and figures from a wide variety of respected sources and visually shows people what that information means in an attractive and easy-to-understand way. You could literally write about the exact same information and most people would give more weight to the infographic simply because it looks more professional and polished. Why?

 

We’re visual creatures. Even the most ardent readers tend to respond better to information that’s imparted to them visually, and we’re not just saying this lightly. 90 percent of the information that we process as human beings is visual, so if you can find a way to visually convey a complex idea, more people are likely to understand it. There’s a related reason for this, too. While it is possible to transmit the same ideas with words, doing it with pictures takes a lot less time. So a big part of the reason that more people will process the information is because they’re actually willing to put in the 30 seconds or so it takes to scan the infographic as opposed to the five minutes it takes to read your blog post about the same thing.

 

People will share it. The number of searches for infographics went up by an astounding 800 percent from 2010 to 2012, and people love passing them around. Why? In part this is because of the time issue mentioned above – people are far more likely to share an infographic than they are to pass on an article they like. But it goes beyond even that. Simply put, by their nature and design infographics are easy to share. They’re perfect for social networks where people like pretty images and quick bites of information, and because they come with an embed code that links back to your site, infographics are fantastic link generators and traffic drivers.

 

You can promote your brand. Even forgetting about the traffic you can drive to your site, infographics are an incredibly useful marketing tool because they’re a way to promote your brand every single time someone sees them. How so? Include a company logo or mention your business’s name on the infographic itself and you’re not only letting people know that you exist, but reminding them that your company is behind this awesome thing that they’re looking at. This, obviously, goes back to the first benefit mentioned – looking like an expert. People won’t just be thinking about your company, but mentally marking you down as the brand that knows their stuff.

 

They cross language barriers. If you do business in multiple countries (or have aspirations of achieving this), infographics are going to help you a lot more than written content because they are much easier to understand without extensive translation. Why? Because pictures and numbers are far more universal than a block of text.

 

These aren’t the only benefits to creating an infographic, but most boil down to the same thing – they’re more likely to catch people’s attention than other forms of content because they’re the perfect marriage of eye-catching visuals and pithy written facts and figures. And when it comes to content marketing, attention is what you’re looking for. Good infographics can win you a lot of it in a short amount of time.