Infographics have become an increasingly more popular means of communicating valuable information in a succinct and shareable manner.
The effort of creating infographics is very front-loaded in the sense that, once the infographic is constructed and designed, it tends to share itself after it gains a small amount of traction. In order to reach these ideal circumstances, business owners should try to focus on creating an infographic that provides unique data-driven information that is relevant to share.
Infographic Creation
52% of infographics created in 2016 were based on third-party information and surveys. These did so well because the infographic consolidated information from several reputable sources and presented it in an easy manner. Only 18% of infographics were done as a part of an original study or survey.
Not only is the necessary information already available online, but creating an original study is ultimately more time- and resource-consuming. That isn’t to say that basing an infographic on an original study would be ineffective; in fact, it might provide you with an edge as a content-creator and incentivize other businesses to share your study.
The first step in creating your infographic to promote your small business involves picking a topic, gathering information, and creating and designing the infographic itself. If you don’t have a designer handy in-house, the design and creation part can be done by freelancers or other third-parties. Canva is a free design tool that could also be utilized for creating an infographic.
Topic Research
The most important part is to pick a topic that is both very relevant to your business and also built for virality. This part best works by marrying a pattern-expert mindset with a psychological mindset.
What trends can you identify that aren’t oversaturated? A few good ways to come up with ideas are to utilize services such as Buzzsumo to find trending content or to browse questions on Quora and relevant Reddit forums. The most popular results might be a great start to your infographic topic hunt. Be sure to gather reputable sources for your information to make your infographic more credible.
Who do you want to share your infographic? This requires you to understand the psychology of someone who will share the infographic on their social media channels or include it on their site. For example, if your goal with infographic marketing is to generate more leads for your Krav Maga martial arts class, you would do best creating a topic that would be shared by your ideal clients.
For example, an infographic about “How to Defend from a Knife Attack in 8 Steps” peppered in with relevant statistical information would spur interest from people interested in self-defense. Whether those people are potential clients or an influential martial arts blog, you would be accomplishing your goal.
Optimize Your Infographic
By sharing your infographic on your social media and optimizing it for onsite SEO, you’ve skimmed the surface of infographic marketing. Your infographic could provide a significant return on investment even if you only do this part.
But, we’re here to take you to the next level. In order to get the full value of your infographic, even if someone saves and embeds the image on their blog, you must make sure you have optimized the meta-data on the image itself. Here is a quick checklist:
- Name it descriptively and make sure your keyword is in the title.
- Include your keyword in the content and description.
- Set your alt-text to the keyword.
- Use a popular image file type like JPEG or PNG.
Remember, Google can’t read images (yet) so it is very important to name your file appropriately to let search engine crawlers pick it up. For example, Image002.png would be less effective than krav-maga-defend-from-knife-attacker.
Extra Steps
By now, you have this killer infographic and, possibly, some traction. To take it to the next level, you could reach out to relevant blogs and email their editors to encourage them to share your infographic because it would be useful to their audience. A simple friendly email would suffice, but, depending on the power of the blog, it might cost a modest amount to include a link back to your site. These backlinks to your website can be extremely powerful ways to boost your website in the search rankings.
Conclusion
As a small business owner, it is very important to diversify the type of content you are incorporating into your strategy. A text- and image-based content strategy is quickly becoming the boring standard for social media and content marketing, and brands that utilize other forms of media are likely to enjoy additional engagement.
