Eight tips for promoting your brand with infographics
The term infographic has been gaining momentum for some time now, although the concept itself is neither new nor is it exclusive to marketing.
Graphical representation and communication of any information can be described as an infographic (information + graphics) material or content, so the applicability here is far and wide. Be it an ad banner, a creative piece road safety warning, or the marketing insights provided by your marketing agency; technically they are all infographics.
In business, however, infographics are much more specific in nature and vary in accordance with the goals of their creation. Nevertheless, all infographic material used for various commercial representation and communication can be divided into three broad categories, which are data visualization, editorial infographics, and information design.
As to how you can potentially use them to boost your own branding efforts, that’s what we are going to discuss next.
Orient your infographic content to suit your target audience
The definition of your business’s target audience should be as specific as possible, and the marketing infographics should be created exclusively with them in mind – this is where market research comes in handy.
When you are trying to communicate a message to your audience via infographic content, it needs to feel relatable to the people/businesses receiving them. On failing to do so, the entire marketing expenditure will be a waste of time, money, and effort.
On the other hand, if your target audience can closely relate to the material, the resulting ROI can be very impressive.
Use the magic of colors
The importance of using the right colors in your infographic content cannot be overstated. Almost all human beings make decisions based on visual cues, whether they realize it or not.
Marketers have been taking advantage of this forever, and in the case of infographics, the proper use of the right colors at the right places can do wonders for your ROI.
While it’s a complex concept that requires at least some relevant education, practice, and experience to perfect, here are a few brief pointers to help you make the best out of color schemes and themes for any infographic content.
- Choose color schemes that suit the theme; marketing headphones with bright hues work because people associate music with jovialness
- Add a few suitable items that fit the theme; a small bakery business can tastefully integrate cartoony cookies, pastries, etc. within the infographic content
- Consistency in between the color scheme and the theme; don’t contrast the goal of selling scented candles by choosing a greyish, dull color scheme
- Don’t exceed the three colors limit; any more and it will begin to look non-appealing and overdone
- Don’t mix and match between the three primary color scheme categories; choose either a monochromatic, complementary or triadic theme for the infographic
- Create continuity and a sense of recognition with your target audience by staying true to a few very specific color schemes
- Never undermine the importance of readability; every letter should be clearly legible and not lost through the poor placement of fonts or choice of background color
Complete a course in marketing
Everything we have already discussed, and everything else that we are about to share with you, will begin to make more sense if you complete a course in marketing.
Check out this fitting infographic, which does an excellent job of explaining the roles of a modern marketer. In fact, it also serves as a good example for visually experiencing how targeted infographic content in marketing is created and utilized.
Seamlessly combine it with content marketing
Find the most audience-specific piece of content you have available at the moment, and then look for places where you can insert infographics to:
- Better represent and communicate parts of the content to your audience, as well as the main message your content is supposed to deliver
- Connect different parts of the content to each other with visual connections, so as to close continuity gaps that often exist in written content
- Add a few, new supplemental points to further strengthen the content
- Explain complex concepts in the content with visual representations and explanations
- Generate internal and external backlinks
- Make your longest blog posts, eBooks, and PDF files more interesting and appealing to the target audience
Create comparative infographics to sell your own or affiliate products or services
People like their information short and sweet, whenever possible. Let’s take, for example, a customer looking to buy a pair of high-quality headphones. They have already researched a bit about the topic and have even managed to shortlist only two or three models as their favorites.
At this point, a carefully curated infographic, which directly pits the headphone models against each other in terms of features, price, quality, etc. It is exactly what the customer is looking for.
The helpful visual representation makes it easier to take a final decision, so at that point, the customer would be highly likely to make a purchase immediately from one of the affiliate links.
The same strategy can also be applied to promote your own products or services, even if your company’s product is not on their list. The infographic could still include what the product has to offer and provide the customer with another choice. Even if they don’t buy from you right away, your brand will now enter the potential customer’s sphere of awareness because:
- The infographic provided helpful information that they needed at that time
- The use of visual techniques, which are key to creating a successful piece of infographic content will keep your brand in the customer’s mind
- The company and the customer will be aware of each other’s existence, as well as their relevance to one another, providing the brand with more opportunities for targeted, personalized marketing
Use a few classic content marketing strategies for promoting your infographic content
Written content with visual cues has been around for a long time, and way before digital marketing even became a thing. Although the mediums may have changed to an extent, the effectiveness of classic content marketing strategies has not.
This is largely owed to the fact that we still respond to a few primary calls to action on an instinctive level. Therefore, if you can create a sense of urgency, rarity, inspiration, intrigue, exclusivity, opportunity, and other similar themes with your infographic content that appeals to the emotional side of your target audience, success rates will be high.
Keep in mind that infographics are more powerful in producing all of the necessary effects, as compared to only written content. This happens because infographics also have the advantage of appealing to our visual perception, strengthening the words with more meaning and power.
Animation in infographics?
It may or may not be suited for the piece, but there are opportunities where including animation in infographics can have a greater effect than simple images can.
The technology is most certainly there to do so, but it must be done with constraint in mind, and every animation should serve a specific function, which is relevant to the message you are trying to send via the infographic content.
Formal infographics should be highly restrictive in their use of animations, as it may come out as unprofessional. However, explanatory, relevant and unobtrusive animations can be used even in formal content.
To know when to use animation and when not to do so is once again a question of experience and education in marketing standards of today. In general though, avoid them if the theme is grave, as they are best suited for introductory, explanatory, or jovial content.
Use infographics for social media marketing
Content marketing is a tool with vast applicability across all online platforms, while social media marketing refers to using various social media channels for marketing your content.
The type of content used can vary widely, but the very act of using any type of content for marketing purposes is called content marketing, regardless of the platform.
So, that successful email newsletter from the last month can now be used as a Facebook post this month, although some modifications might be necessary to fit the format. We have already discussed how to integrate infographics with written content, so this part should be easy.
That is certainly not everything that there is to using infographics on social media of course. Consider the following ideas to further incorporate infographic content with your social media marketing strategy.
- Create catchy, simple, and colorful infographic content, that’s specifically suited to the image-oriented format of Instagram
- SEO, image results, and Pinterest are intricately connected, so you must have SEO optimized infographic content available on Pinterest to generate backlinks
- Connection
- Separate, shorten and then link infographic pieces from previously successful campaigns via episodic social media posts
- Create infographics to highlight the main attractions of your company’s upcoming social events, webinars, etc.
Given how vast their applications can be as both supplemental and primary content in marketing, the opportunities for using infographics is only limited by the marketer’s imagination and experience.
