Why Are Infographics so Important to Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing has long been considered one of the fundamental strategies necessary for a highly effective marketing campaign. Its long-form text can easily be structured to implement short and long-tail keywords, enables you to connect in a real, human way with your audiences, and is engaging enough to be shared across all of the most popular social media channels.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that even within content marketing, diversity is important. No customer is going to read all of your blog posts. In fact, due in large part to social media, there is a strong preference placed on shorter, simpler, easily digestible pieces on the part of consumers. The longer the content, the more likely readers are to skim through the text, rather than read the whole thing. Does that mean that you shouldn’t publish pieces longer than 500 or so words? Absolutely not! One of the great things about content marketing is that it can used as a tool to educate and inform your target demographics, cementing you as a thought leader within your industry. Rather than sacrifice this authoritative position, consider adding infographics as a weapon to your content marketing arsenal. Here’s why you should.

Infographics Support Your Existing Content

Remember how we mentioned that most readers are likely to skim through longer pieces of text? If you’re writing a highly technical piece that includes many different statistics to help drive home a point, infographics are an excellent addition, as they summarise the core points of your article in a simple, accessible way. Readers can skim through text to get the bigger picture idea, and then turn over to the infographics to digest the numbers and come away from both with a much greater understanding of the material you’ve presented. In this way, the relationship between infographics and content marketing is not a zero-sum one—one should be used to address the weaknesses inherent to the other.

Infographics Improve Information Retention

If you want to improve the reach of your marketing, it’s critical that the content you publish is memorable. Unfortunately, text has long been recognised as an extremely inefficient method of transmitting information when compared to images—customers retain up to three times as much information through their interactions with visual mediums. That means that, if you have a key message that you absolutely want your readers to take away from an article, presenting it in the form of an infographic can greatly encourage retention, and therefore improve your mindshare among audiences.

Infographics Are Much More Likely to Be Shared Organically

The ultimate goal of every marketer is to have their campaign go viral. Seeing the product of their efforts shared across social media, travelling across countries, time zones, and social networks is undoubtedly one of the key signs that your campaign was a success. Unfortunately, content in the form of blog posts or news articles are not particularly conducive to this—media shared between individuals needs to make an immediate impact, which text simply doesn’t do. Infographics, thankfully, solve all of these problems. Customers can post the image directly, and, if it’s designed correctly to catch the eye of wider audiences, it will spark a genuine interest in the message that it contains.

Infographics Are Easily Adjusted to Account for Regional Preferences

Apart from the language used in the infographic which is always going to be difficult to translate and localise, infographics are exceptionally versatile when it comes to tapping into the interests of diverse demographics. Since the information contained within is always going to be presented in an aesthetically pleasing fashion with images and vibrant colours at the fore, tweaking them to be posted on a global basis is incredibly simple. Adjust the colours, saturation, and images or graphics used on a base level and you can suddenly appeal to the artistic preferences of the global population at large. Whether you’re leveraging the colours of their national flags or most popular local sports teams, these simple adjustments can make a huge difference when it comes to the widespread acceptance of your content on a country-by-country basis, greatly facilitating penetration into new markets.

Infographics have typically been viewed in a negative light. They’re not quite as engaging as videos or live feeds, and not quite as informative as content—it’s perhaps due to this negative connotation that many businesses eschew the approach entirely. However, there are a number of truly impressive benefits that can be experienced through the correct use of infographics. While they will never completely replace other pillars of your marketing approach, they will play a crucial supporting role that greatly improves the outcomes of your promotional campaigns.