Questions You Need To Ask Before Making An Infographic

Infographics are one of the most engaging and shareable sources of content out there. They perfectly combine visuals and data into an informative piece of content. When created well and promoted in the right way, infographics can help to boost your social presence, increase brand recognition and improve your backlink profile. But unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for infographics to fall flat especially when you’ve not asked the right questions beforehand. Take a look at the questions we’ve put together below to make sure creating infographics is the best course of action for your business.

Will Your Target Market Be Interested In It?

The infographics that get the most shares and ultimately the most attention are the ones that best appeal to your target audience. Before coming up with an idea for an infographic, you should think about who you want your infographic to appeal to, and decide what that audience wants to see. If you want to appeal to the experts in your industry, go ahead with using jargon or a topic you know they would like more information on. However, if your target audience is broader make the topic and information you include much more simple, straightforward and easy to digest.

It’s also key to ask yourself whether an infographic makes sense in your industry. Will an infographic enhance your content marketing strategy? Will it benefit your industry and those that work within it or an interest in it? If the answer is no, simply do not bother. Just because you have the skill and time available to make an infographic, it doesn’t mean you always should. Choose content that is better suited to those that will read it.

Is The Topic You’re Choosing Diverse Enough?

When deciding on an idea for your infographic, it’s important to pick a topic where you know you have enough information to flesh the infographic out. Whether you’re doing primary research, or secondary research to obtain your stats and information; make sure you have enough of it to make your graphics compelling.

The content and data running through your infographic should coincide, but you shouldn’t be repeating the same idea again and again. When choosing data for your infographic, ask whether it ties into the question or overall topic of the infographic and ask whether it adds value to the infographic it as a whole. If the answer is no, cut it out and find an alternative. You need to make sure your infographic is sharable, and that comes down to finding compelling pieces of information to contain within it.

You may find the topic you thought you were going to focus on is better suited to a blog post, or a much smaller social graphic or social media post. If that is the case that’s fine, save the time and resource required for creating an infographic for a more suited subject matter.

Has This Infographic Already Been Done?

Some industries are heavily populated with infographics, marketing being one of them! So before you decide on a final idea or angle for yours, take a look into whether an infographic has already been done. A simple Google search should do it. If you find out it has, it doesn’t mean you can’t still cover that topic. It means you can take a different angle, to create an infographic that is unique, and even more compelling. There is no point creating a piece of content that is the same as somebody else’s, as no one wants to read the same content twice, let alone engage and share it!

Is It Evergreen Content?

We’ve written a whole blog post on evergreen content, so if you want to find out more about it you can do here. Whilst writing evergreen content is key for your blog, it’s just as important when it comes to creating an infographic.

Because infographics are both time and labour intensive, making sure you create something that will last the test of time is key. By doing so, you’re giving yourself a piece of content that is shareable for months or even years to come. You can share the graphic with various audiences and on different platforms without it coming obsolete.

Whilst picking a topic that is trending today, or this week might have some good success initially, soon after you’ll see your traffic and shares drop. You might even see your page bounce rate suffer as a result, as no one wants to see out of date content. Instead, produce an infographic that will be of value to your target audience for at least the next 12 months.

Do You Have The Skill and Resource?

Much more goes into creating an infographic than you might initially think. Research, content writing, design skills, outreach/link building skills… The list goes on. Before rushing into creating an infographic, consider whether you’ve got the skills and resource to execute it well. If you can do everything in-house, who’s going to carry the campaign out and do they have the time to do so? If you don’t have the design expertise in-house, you need to think about the associated costs of outsourcing it vs what you want to achieve from the infographic. Make sure you’re putting together at the right time for your business and your audience.

Do You Have A Plan To Promote It?

The last question to answer is what you’re going to do with your infographic. How do you plan to promote your infographic so that it reaches your target market? How will you encourage them to share it?

• Reach out – it’s time to put your outreach and link building skills to the test! Make sure you’ve got this process fine-tuned prior to carrying it out so that you don’t waste time or resources trying to figure it out.
• If you’re housing your infographic on your blog, make every effort to make it as shareable as possible. Have those social sharing buttons on there! Even consider adding a line for people to get in touch if they want the HTML code to embed it in their own post.
• You might want to think about creating a bit of a social campaign around your infographic. Why not cut your infographic into smaller chunks, are share them on social, pointing the users to your blog post for the full thing. Get web traffic in where you can.

And that’s it! 6 questions to ask yourself before making an infographic. If after reading this thinking you might need a little help with creating infographics as part of your content marketing – get in touch! Our digital marketing team are here to help you make more from your content.