As infographics increase in popularity, we’re receiving more requests about how clients can add them to other marketing channels. By the end of the consultation, the client usually has a complete marketing plan to promote their current infographic, as well as boost their other channels with them in the future.
If you’re unsure of what to do with an infographic or where it would live, check out these five ideas for this new, popular content.
Spice up Your Blog With Some Infographic Color
Text posts might be easy, but visuals provide the engagement that keeps visitors clicking. In HubSpot’s Content Marketing report for 2016, they found that content with relevant images gets 94% more clicks than pure text content. Plus, brightly colored visuals increase the visitor’s eagerness to click by 80%. This means that a quick way to increase your readership and audience is to feature visuals like infographics.
The good news is you don’t have to post daily or weekly infographics with each blog post. Instead, feature your infographics throughout your blog with snippets linking back to past content or updates to put a modern spin on evergreen content.
For example, Popular Science posted this Wheel of Exotic Pets in 2013 as a guide for those considering owning a wild animal. If Pop Sci decided to cover a more newsworthy topic (like the Florida woman fighting to keep her motorcycle-riding pet alligator), then they could point to where alligators fall on the wheel of exotic pets and keep an old infographic fresh and relevant.
The simple act of updating old infographic content is enough to bring it back to the front. You may only need to change a few sections or data points to bring it into 2016, but that change could turn into months of increased traffic and ROI.
Trim Your Infographics Down for Social Engagement
We know that your infographic is your baby, but cutting it up is one of the easiest ways to garner social engagement while driving traffic to your site.
First, mini-infographics are great for sharing if you want more content but don’t have a large budget. Instead of ideating for a full infographic, brainstorm five to ten statistics for a specific topic and build a theme for a week or a month. Continuing with the animal theme, a zoo might create seven “info-cards” about rhinos to celebrate rhinoceros preservation week. These can be combined into a long-form infographic or blog post at the end of the week for further promotion.
To understand how infographics drive traffic to your blog, look no further than your favorite comic strip. Comics like “The Oatmeal” or “Cyanide and Happiness” will suck you in with the first two panels, and then make you click to their site for the whole piece. By mimicking these popular humorists, you’ll be able to use your infographic content to bring people from social media into your site’s funnel.
Entice Bloggers for Outreach Efforts
Bloggers across the globe prefer infographics because they make a lasting visual impression. The rapid processing and engagement of visuals over text posts means your network is significantly more likely to post or syndicate your infographic content than your text content.
If you’re struggling to connect with alpha influencers in your industry, try asking to create an infographic for their blog. In all likelihood, they receive 99 terrible requests per day, and yours can be the one good one.
Creating infographics for outreach requires three things from your creation team:
- An understanding of their brand guidelines
- An understanding of your brand guidelines
- The ability to combine the two into a cohesive infographic
You want to create something the blends seamlessly with their site, but still has your branding and touch. You can identify these by finding the crucial elements of design for each page and deciding what can be compromised versus what needs to stay.
Send Infographics to Your Influencers to Share
We can create a gorgeous infographic for just about any company and industry, but sometimes clients still struggle to get shares or likes because of their audience. It’s hard to generate 500 likes when you only have an audience of 100.
This is where influencer marketing saves the day. Reach out to the big-wigs in your industry and show them the awesome content that’s living on your blog.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, influencer marketing combines word-of-mouth marketing with social promotion and generates 34% more customer retention and twice the amount of sales over traditional paid programs.
Many people consider influencer marketing as a paid form of blogger outreach, so it’s important to budget for infographic promotion along with the creation costs. Before you create an IG, create a list of the top 5 to 10 bloggers in your niche and ask for their influencer rates. This way you can budget for a promotional strategy long before the graphics even hit your site.
Don’t Forget About Your Own Newsletter Content
With all this outreach planning and influencer publishing, it’s easy to forget about your own email marketing needs. Your infographic is a great tool for reaching out to unknown audiences and bucketing them based on their interests.
Because infographics are more likely to be engaged with than traditional content, it’s okay to send them out to your general email audience to see who clicks. For example, a solar company might create an infographic containing tips to make one’s home more energy-efficient to identify homeowners in their audience looking to go solar. Business owners who care about efficiency will also find that IG interesting, even if they’re not the target audience.
Like most visual content, placing an infographic above the fold will increase the likelihood that your email readers keep scrolling and eventually click to your blog.
It’s possible for your infographic to live for years across all your marketing channels, and the more you invest in sharing it, the longer you will reap the return on investment. Your marketing channels might not all be mature enough to generate a strong return, but the more you grow and invest, the better your content will perform. Creating an infographic is only half the battle; it takes a strong and flexible marketing strategy to use it to your best advantage.
This post originally appeared on CopyPress, and is re-published with permission.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Unsplash/Pixabay.com
In-post Photo: Pixelkult/Pixabay.com
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