Let Infographics Help You Make Your Point Instantly
Reprinted with the author’s permission from Content Marketing Today.
Here’s a great example of an effective infographic that illustrates social media behavior by age group, based on a Forrester Research study. With few words and relevant graphics, it enables us to absorb lots of information in a hurry.
That’s what effective infographics are all about.
I fully understand the importance of the visual component of content, but I’m not very good at conceptualizing or creating great visuals to illustrate the points that I’m trying to make.
So, I was delighted to find a wonderfully helpful—and visual—site that is putting me on the right track: CoolInfographics.com from Randy Krum. As he indicates, it’s all about getting your point across. Which, in turn, is essential to effective content marketing. You must make it obvious to your target customers why your content is relevant and important to them. On the web, you have only a few seconds to make that happen. Effective infographics can make that all-important instant connection.
If you need as much visual help as I do, you’ll love Randy’s site and his recent post with practical advice—illustrated with infographic examples, of course—for us verbal types.
Here are five practical infographic tips from Randy’s recent blog post, 10 Tips for (Journalists) Designing Infographics:
- Be Concise: Design your infographic to convey one idea really well. That is, keep it simple for the viewer so they can really absorb your point.
- Be Visual: Design your infographic with your final for viewing size in mind. Don’t allude to a chart they need to click on to view. Keep them involved with your text while they look at the infographic.
- Be Different: If you can avoid it, don’t use a bar chart, a line chart or a pie chart. Grab readers attention by doing something that is unique while still making your point effectively.
- Be Accurate: Remember your geometry and visualize differences using area. Thus, if you are using circles to represent relative size, make sure that illustrating 3X larger, you use a circle that is 3X bigger, not 9X bigger.
- Be Varied: Find a good visual style that’s right for the data you’re trying to share. If your data is about countries, plot it on a world map not a bar chart that lists countries. To illustrate this point, Randy showed the infographic below from Emily Schwartzman about the aftermath of the hurricane that devastated Haiti in 2009.
Words work well. But pictures in the form of infographics can make all the difference in getting your point across in an instant. Once you have captured readers with your picture, you can then wow them with your words.
Here are some links that Randy offered to visual tools available on the Internet to help and inspire you in building your own infographics:
- Tableau Public
- Many Eyes
- Swivel
- Google Public Data Explorer
- Gapminder
- Wordle
- WorldMapper
- GunnMap
- StatPlanet Map Maker
Newt Barrett is president of Content Marketing Strategies and co-author with Joe Pulizzi of Get Content Get Customers.
2 Comments
Love this post. Inforgraphics make for interesting content that is visually pleasing and informative.
At the Internet marketing company I work at, Vertical Measures, we just created a link building infographic to better explain the types of links you want to obtain and how to get them. We have experienced first hand how difficult it can be to explain types of links and page rank to clients, so we came up with the analogy of comparing link building to beer. So far, we have had a lot of positive feedback.
If you want to check it out: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/linktoberfest-seo-infographic-for-link-data-visualization/
Check out this post for a complete list of infographic resources and sites. They are all worth checking out! http://bluewheelmedia.com/infographics