For small businesses with a limited marketing budget, it can often be difficult to stand out from the crowd.
After all, the internet is full of marketing noise, and much of it seems to come from big brands with unlimited budgets and entire teams of digital marketing prodigies.
How can your small business make an impact amidst this ocean of electronic information and, most importantly, do it in a cost-effective manner? One word: infographics.
Infographics (a clipped compound of the words ‘information’ and ‘graphics’, word nerds!) are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge used to present information quickly and clearly. Think: How To Style Your Home With Feng Shui; How To Get More Blog Subscribers.
When done right, infographics have the potential to be widely shared and could even go viral, gaining a large amount of free exposure for your brand.
The proven effectiveness of infographics
If you’re unconvinced about the effectiveness of infographics, allow us to throw a few bombshell stats at you which might change your mind!
- People are thirty times more likely to read an infographic in its entirety than a news article or blog post.
- When visual information is used to help explain a task, 80% fewer errors are made. This means a well-designed infographic can really help to solve your customers’ queries and leave them with a highly positive impression of your business.
- Infographics allow you to show that you’re an expert in your field. Showcasing your knowledge in a visually appealing way, using graphical content, helps potential customers feel they can trust your products and services.
- Infographics can be a very useful SEO (search engine optimisation) tool, as popular graphics tend to be widely linked to from other websites around the internet. The more quality backlinks you have pointing to your website, the higher search engines tend to rank you in their results pages.
- Perhaps most importantly for your business, infographics actively increase sales.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel
You don’t even need to spend countless hours researching information for an infographic – the chances are that you’ve already created content that can be ‘recycled’.
Written an article for your website’s blog offering advice on how to save energy in the workplace? Simply condense the blog by pulling out the most important facts and tips, add relevant icons and pictures, and you’ve got yourself a new infographic, ready to be released into the wilds of the web.
Other content that could potentially be repurposed and turned into an infographic include: a webinar, a course, a survey, a brochure, an interview, or even your company history.
To transform a piece of long-form content into an infographic all you need do is identify its key takeaway messages, and then present them in an easily digestible format which can be quickly and easily read and understood.
Amazing infographics
Graphic designers like the experts here at MAD Ideas can create an amazing infographic for you, and you don’t necessarily need to spend a huge amount of marketing budget. What’s more, if you need help with statistics and data you are just not sure how to interpret, get in touch and we’ll be happy to guide you.
Get sharing your infographic
You’ve created a really informative and visually impressive infographic that you know people will enjoy and find useful. What now? It’s time to get sharing, of course! There’s no point in spending time and money on creating digital assets if no-one gets to see them.
The first and most obvious place to share your infographic is across your social media channels – Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Don’t forget to use suitable hashtags so that people who don’t follow you can find your great content!
Pinterest is another place that’s well worth sharing your content, as the platform is actually best suited to the long format of a typical infographic.
LinkedIn is another great place to share business-related infographics, as content in this format tends to do really well on the platform and receive lots of engagement and shares.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, don’t forget to publish infographics on your own website! By using SEO techniques (including relevant keywords in the headline and accompanying copy) you will ensure your content is more likely to be discovered by people searching the web for information on the topic you’ve covered.
Great infographics are often linked to by other blogs and news websites, and a boost in backlinks pointing to your site can really do wonders for your performance in the search engine results pages.
Good luck in creating your first infographic! If you need advice or would like a professional to help you create informative and visually compelling infographics, be sure to contact us at MAD Ideas today!
“The work we do in the Employee Experience team is largely influenced by the feedback we receive from our people so I know just how important it is to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up. The employee listening initiatives we run throughout the year are integral in defining our priorities but it’s important our people feel they can speak up outside of surveys and focus groups. I’m delighted to be part of our Safe to Speak Up insight action group; working to remove barriers and ensure colleagues have the confidence to speak up. Working with MAD Ideas on the concepts has been a pleasure and I look forward to continuing our partnership as this work progresses.”
Employee Experience, SGN