The internet is suffused with data that is ever-flowing and ever-changing. Keeping your audience engaged with your content, whether it is on your website, social media, or newsletters, is, unsurprisingly, a hard task for businesses.
In an attempt to decrease bounce rates, web managers are trying every trick in the book but there is one tool that managers haven’t used optimally yet—infographics.
Human beings are naturally very visual, which is why they prefer looking at something, rather than reading it.
Images are faster to absorb—a picture really does speak a thousand words—and with life becoming increasingly more busy, getting information to your audience as quickly as possible should be the primary goal for all marketers.
What Are Infographics?
What is an infographic, you may still be wondering. Essentially, infographics combine data, images, and text to give readers a quick and comprehensive guide to a topic.
For almost a decade now, infographics have been positively impacting marketing efforts, and even more so now, with the rise of content marketing.
The use of visuals in marketing has been doing wonders to drive social media sales, and the same tactics can be effective when designing websites, as well.
Information Retention
Making a website, whether or not you are using this helpful guide from Fit Small Business, is one of the major components of a company’s marketing plan.
The website is where your information lives and how you can convert visitors into buyers, and eventually into loyal customers. Which is why it is imperative that your ecommerce landing page lead to conversions.
But it isn’t an easy task to create comprehensive landing pages that not only arrest your audience’s attention but also give them the required information they need to complete a purchase.
Which is why infographics are such useful tools.
Infographics can contain a great deal of information without being overwhelming. Compare a large block of text to an image filled with color, icons and small paragraphs.
In the example below for a learning service website, you can see how a simple, colorful design with concise text shares a large amount of information quickly yet effectively.
When you are trying to keep your audience engaged on your website long enough for them to complete the user journey and make a purchase or subscription, an infographic is a great way to accomplish this.
While large paragraphs convey more information, much of it can be extraneous to a reader who only has time to skim the text.
An infographic solves that problem by minimizing the text and making the information easy to absorb.
Brand Recall
One of the most important aspects of your website is to showcase your brand.
Many small businesses use website themes when building their online presence but usually spend time adapting them so as to incorporate their brand identity into the theme.
Ensuring that all your media is consistent with your brand is extremely important for converting visitors into customers. And identity goes well beyond your brand logo.
The identity of a business can be conveyed through imagery, colors, and fonts, all of which help customers remember your brand simply by looking at it.
Which is why infographics are such a great tool for brand recall.
With infographics, you can bring all the elements of your brand identity into one cohesive image that will tell your potential customers who you are with one glance.
As you can see in this realtor’s infographic below, even without a logo, you can immediately distinguish the brand from its competitors:
In addition to this, creating an infographic places you as an expert in your field as it takes time and research to create, even more so if your infographic is largely statistical in nature.
Audiences are circumspect about the businesses they patronize, and with the help of infographics, you can appear as an expert that they will want to associate themselves with.
Infographics Boost SEO
Visuals of any kind—pictures, videos, and infographics—are imminently more shareable than text. Because of their aesthetic appeal and how concise they are, visuals are shared large and wide across the internet, and none more so than infographics.
More importantly, the combination of textual and statistical information in infographics makes them contenders for becoming viral content.
Thus, by using infographics on your website, you open up the possibility of your image being shared to audiences you may not have been able to reach organically.
And if your content does go viral, you could see a massive boost to your overall SEO. If you’re looking for good SEO analysis tools, Hubspot has a great list.
Additionally, including links and adding strong alt tags to your infographics can also increase your SEO, as it will help place you on a higher ranked page on Google.
Alt tags are important even within images and infographics, as Brafton outlines in this article about keyword optimization, because they allow your images to rank on Google Image Search, which is tied into your SERP.
By adding a link to your infographic, you can also earn backlinks from sites who share your image, which will significantly affect your SEO because it will signal to Google that your content and website are reputable enough to be cited by others.
The final result will be an increase in visitors to your site and the potential for earning new customers.
Infographics and Engagement
The visual nature of marketing and the fact that most internet users are incredibly busy, makes the use of infographics crucial for small businesses.
Not only do site visitors look at images more keenly than text, they are also more susceptible to absorbing information that ties images, text, and directions.
By focusing solely on text, you will not be doing your website any favors. If you really want to see engagement, you need to incorporate visuals like infographics on an on-going basis.
Once you implement an infographic on your landing page, you can use heatmap technology, like Crazy Egg, to see where on your infographic visitors focus their attention on.
This in turn, will help you detect hotspots that are most attractive to your audience, along with scroll depth, so you can use those statistics as a starting point for creating your next set of visuals.
Bonus: How to Create An Infographic
If your company already has a graphic designer, or can outsource projects to a designer, they can create an infographic for your site.
But for most small businesses, it is far more convenient to use infographic templates that allow for a great deal of customization and for you to use the graphic in multiple ways.
Before you begin creating an infographic, you should conduct a keyword analysis on your topic and landing pages.
Keywords are crucial for understanding your customers and will help guide the direction of the infographic design.
Once you have your keywords and target audience in place, you can use this guide for making an infographic in five steps.
You need to gather all your information together, along with headings and subheadings, as well as the text, for which you might need the assistance of an accomplished UX writer who has a good understanding of your products and services and can thus write content for your infographic that will hold the audience’s attention.
And then it is simply a matter of embedding your infographic on your landing page and monitoring your conversion rates.
Care to Share?
Do you have any interesting or informative infographics handy? Let us know by tagging us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
All infographics sourced from Venngage.
