Dr IT Services RO: Visual

Infographics as Content Marketing Tactic servicii seo It’s safe to say that Big Data is revolutionizing 21^st century business. The big question for marketers, however, is how do you take the wealth of information at your disposal and effectively simplify and present it in an engaging and informative way? One answer is infographics.

Defining what entails a good infographic is complex. For one, not all data lends itself to creative and unique visual communication. Someone who’s expert in design may not understand your audience or how to map relevant data in a compelling way. Don’t forget: great content isn’t great until it’s discovered, consumed and shared.

A couple of years ago, big splashy infographics with little substance were able to attract a lot of traffic because they represented a new content marketing format. While the novelty of the format has waned, they are still a fantastic way to present ideas and data in an easily digestible way as long as you think about the story behind the numbers and readers glean actual insight.

Remember, data is the foundation of every infographic, so when you have a dataset on hand, take the time to learn what it’s about, where it’s from, the methodology behind the estimates and what makes it interesting and unique.

According to statistics gathered by Hubspot, consider that

90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual

Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text

40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text

So, the proliferation of infographics should come as no surprise.

When it comes to business, big data offers unprecedented insight, improved decision-making and untapped sources of revenue. In the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics can reveal patterns in our lives and our world in fresh and surprising ways.

Simply put, infographics as a content marketing tactic provide a tool to educate and inform your primary target audience using data-rich visualization through storytelling, which TopRank has advocated for years.

Pros

Helps with search engine optimization (SEO) – As the infographic gains traction, it earns incoming links.

Builds brand awareness – By adding an unobtrusive logo in a prime position on the graphic, you can boost your online branding. One way to measure this is by viewing image file loads in your server logs.

Creates social buzz – It’s easy to measure new followers, fans and sharing on various social networks.

Establish company as an industry thought leader – By utilizing your own company data, internal subject matter experts, and industry related research, you offer a rich trove of information, demonstrating your expertise.

Cons

Infographics created solely for their ‘linkbait’ potential has resulted in a glut of poorly executed infographics, giving a bad name to worthy and creditable data visualization.

The cost to create a striking infographic may place this content marketing tactic out of reach for small businesses.

Outsourcing information mining for statistics or hard data may result in a disconnect with your audience’s true pain points to be effective.

Unrealistic expectations of what it takes to make an infographic ‘go viral’ could perpetuate infographic fatigue, doing more harm than good for your brand.

What the Experts Are Saying

“As a Google search term, ‘infographic’ has increased nearly twenty-fold in the last five years. Yet infographics have been popular, in one form or another, for centuries. The source of their power isn’t computers or the Internet, but the brain’s natural visual intelligence. Gareth Cook, The New Yorker

“The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means — allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece — when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there’s an instant ‘Aha!’…”David Byren, quoted in BrainPickings.

Infographics That Engage

National Pen Company

Infographics as a Content Marketing Tactic servicii seo Ranked #2 for views and shares on Visual.ly, the National Pen Company created a compelling information-packed infographic geared to their target audience. Who knew so many people still wrote with pens?! They identified over 5,000 personality traits that are reveled when a person writes. With their in-depth data analysis, they tapped into the zeitgeist of handwriting analysis. They intrigued the reader with tidbits of how graphology is even used for detecting lies. In addition to being visually appealing, they cited numerous credible sources in the footer of the graphic. You can view the entire graphic here.

Dell – (TopRank Client)

Infographics as Content Marketing Tactic - Dell servicii seo

Dell, clever as ever, utilized the old-school binary ‘yes-no’ format known to programmers the world over to engage their primary audience. They created a cohesive piece of ‘eye candy’ incorporating humor which, again, works with tech types. While there’s no real data employed, by visualizing a ‘Day in the Life’ of a person sitting in front of a computer all day, Dell made it clear they empathize, making it easy for the reader to connect with the brand.

ADT Home Security Services

Infographics as Content Marketing Tactic Example servicii seo

The creative department at ADT Home Security Services produced this infographic, depicting some of the largest diamond, cash and art-related crimes around the world in recent times.Making use of thorough research, the infographic’s author establishes what are generally believed to be the top heists in all three categories, and writes up notes showcasing just why each is classified as ‘extreme.’

The infographic does a good job of incorporating a clean central theme, blending in the different heist scenarios into a single canvas. The recurring stylistic elements of the map background and the ‘outcome’ section tie together the separate topics into the intended focus of the need for security without hitting the reader over the head.

Infographic Best Practices

Write a catchy title. (Easier said than done.)

Choose an interesting vs. ‘hot’ topic that resonates with your customers’ needs.

Be topical. Check Google trends for trending topics relevant to your industry and/or target audience.

Involve credible sources in the data collection, such as prominent companies, people or research organizations, and then encourage those sources to help you promote the resulting graphic.

Promote vial social channels and make it easy to share or embed by including HTML code.

On the resized image page, try and insert text to help with search engine crawlers and include social sharing buttons above and below the infographic.

Avoid a white background or too much text. Infographics are often shared on multiple websites and blogs, most of which have white backgrounds. If your infographic’s background is also white, then deciphering where it begins and ends will be difficult.

Link to a larger image of the graphic to a page with no formatting for a better user experience.

List references of research sources you’ve cited, which will increase the perceived value of your efforts.

For more on the optimization and marketing of infographics, see Chapter 10, pp. 142 – 144, Optimize, by Lee Odden.

Remember, you’re telling a story. Too much emphasis on data points (less is better) and not enough on high resolution visuals will result in a ho-hum infographic that receives a tepid response. Design isn’t just about making things pretty. It’s about making things work and, in the case of infographics, that means representing data accurately and clearly. It means letting the data speak.

What do you envision the next generation of infographics will be?

Photo credit: Shutterstock

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Posted by randfish

The marketing industry seems to have a love-hate relationship with infographics. When they’re really done well, they can be effective ways of conveying a lot of complex information in a way that’s easier to digest. The problem is that relatively few of today’s infographics are really done well, and many are simply created for shallow SEO benefit.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the differences between infographics and visual assets, and why the latter are far more effective in our efforts.

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For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard:

5285222e923f41.38187458 Whiteboard Visual Infographics Friday Assets

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition to of Whiteboard Friday. This week I’m going to take a stance. It’s a little bit of a strong and contrarian stance. I’m going to say that I really, really dislike most infographics. In fact, not even most. The vast majority of infographics I strongly dislike. And that said, I really like visual assets. Today I’m going to try and explain the difference to you and show you why I’m a huge believer in one and such a disrespecter of the other.

So the typical infographic and the thing that frustrates me about it so much is that it’s really designed primarily to get embeds, to get links, potentially to get some traffic and build some branding. But it’s actually not optimized for a lot of these things. In fact, because the medium has both become so overused and because the execution on many of them is such poor quality, I find that they often hurt more than they help. Because of that, I’m not a fan.

So here is your typical infographic. How obsessed are Facebook users with celebrities? Oh my gosh, look, 35% have liked a celebrity’s page, and look, more and more people have liked more and more celebrity pages over time. Here’s a picture of some people, and here are words in some graphic format that’s really hard to read and unnecessary illustrations on the side just to ornament this thing up.

Then they hope that someone is going to pick it up and embed it on their news site, and occasionally this stuff does work. In fact, for a few years now it has worked. The challenge is it keeps going down and down and down. It’s reaching a point of diminishing returns, and I think that’s because audiences are really tired of the infographic format or are getting very tired, especially more sophisticated and savvy audiences, which for a lot of B2B and even many B2C marketers, let’s face it, we are reaching those areas.

Also, these things can be tremendously burdensome to try and put on a web page. They’re hard to read a lot of the time. So it makes it challenging even when someone does embed it. Google has said specifically that they’re looking at algorithmic ways that they can work around infographics that get embedded that people didn’t really mean to or intend to link back, and they are merely doing a link to the infographic because of the embed itself.

This kind of stuff, eh, I’m just not about that. I don’t think that most of us in the inbound marketing field should be about that, despite the potentially positive impact that something very similar can have.

So these are visual assets. There are many different kinds of visual assets. In fact, I would say infographics, traditional infographics are just one type of visual asset and possibly not the best one. In fact, probably not the best one in my opinion.

Photos, just a collection of pictures from relevant and interesting people, events, places, even concepts that are illustrated, these get picked up. They get shared around the web. They’re useful for social media networks. But they’re also useful to have in a photo library that people might take and use for all kinds of different reasons.

Charts and graphs that illustrate or explain the numbers behind a story or a phenomenon, these can be incredibly useful, and they get picked up and used all the time by sources that want to quote the numbers and even by sources that originated the numbers that are looking for visual ways to represent them. This is a phenomenal way to build value through visual assets.

Visual representations, I do stuff like this all the time. Think of the SEO Pyramid. It starts at the base with accessibility, and then we talk about keywords and links, social, user and usage signals, and all that kind of stuff. I’ve done some visuals like that on Whiteboard Friday, things like the ranking factors by distribution through the pie chart explaining those different things.

I’ve done stuff like the T-shaped web marketer, talking about going deep in a particular niche, but having a lot of cross domain expertise. These are not high-quality graphics. They’re made by me. I use Flash 6 to make these things, because I learned Flash way back in my days as a web designer. I’m lazy and have not learned to get good at Illustrator or Photoshop in particular. Yet, they get picked up and sent all over the place, and you can see visual assets doing the same thing in all sorts of niches.

Comics, illustrations, or storyboards that tell a narrative visually, incredibly popular and get picked up all the time. Screen shots; even just a simple screen shot with some annotation and explanation, examples of what to do, how to use it, how to interpret that information, layering on top some data, these types of visual assets have huge cachÃ© and value.

You get a lot more opportunity from these kinds of visual assets, in my opinion and experience, for links, for referencing, being referenced by media outlets, by industry resources, by third parties, by people in your professional or personal sphere. You have more of an opportunity for embeds because they’re much simpler to embed, and they can be useful in so many more places than an infographic, which really needs to take up an entire post about it if it’s going to get referenced at all.

They give a lot more value to people. They’re simple to consume, to understand, and they’re useful and usable in ways that infographics often are not. And, a lot of the time they’re far simpler to execute. It doesn’t take a graphic designer to produce a ton of these different types of resources. It often doesn’t cost very much, if anything at all, to make them, and that means you can produce a far greater quantity of visual assets than you could of infographics and have potential there to get links, to get references, to build your brand in really authentic ways.

So I’m sure there will be some vigorous debate and discussion in the comments, and I look forward to it. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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