Leverage Infographic Design to Convey Your Messages.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has pushed all businesses on a universal mission: How to best deliver their messages?
Infographic is one of the emerging presentation styles that help make the mission much easier. Consequently, infographics become more and more prominent in the digital marketing toolkit for communication strategies.
Done right, infographics will be the best storyteller to significantly improve your communication results.

According to Forbes, 74% of marketers use graphics for content and 56% of companies require the use of infographics.

Infographic: Definition, Types and Benefits

Definition

Infographic is the shortened form of “information graphic”. It is a visual way of presenting information, data and statistics. Its layout is simple, clear and eye-catching.

Most readers find infographics a more pleasant read as its design utilizes many colors, flowcharts and icons to improve readability and retention.
An infographic design includes three elements:
Theme: What’s the topic of your infographic?

Different topics will have different best practices for infographic design.
Also, don’t try to mix up two different themes into one digital infographic. Your goal is to make it clear, not to provide an abstract piece of artwork.

Content: What do you want to say via your infographic?

An effective design must provide meaningful information in a way that’s both easy to understand and remember.
Thorough research must be carried out to ensure your content is backed up by established facts and data.

Design Style: How do you want to present your messages?

Here comes the use of colors, icons, vectors and graphics. Just don’t try to squeeze all “trendy” or “nice-looking” stuff into your work. Remember, less is more.

Infographic design

Types of Infographics

The world of infographics hosts so many templates and each has their own uses. Depending on the theme and content, you can start with a specific type of infographics.

A Statistical Infographic serves the need for statistical information such as revenue or growth. As numbers are key here, charts, icons and eye-catching fonts will be used to make this type of data easier to digest.

In contrast, an Information Infographic is often used to demonstrate a lot of information presented in slides or articles. The text here must be short, clear and succinct. Icons, images and colors can be used to emphasize the text.

Infographic Benefits for Businesses

Let’s say your business wants to produce a piece of content about the status of social network usage in Vietnam. After researching, you find Hootsuite’s data the most relevant. Now you have two choices:

The traditional way: You write an article or a paragraph saying something like, “According to Hootsuite, the age range with the most people using social networks is 25-34 in Vietnam, standing at 16.3% for both male and female.” And that’s just a small piece of the whole picture you want to convey.
Infographics:

Which do you think is more effective? And that’s why infographics are often preferred to our good old descriptive text.
Infographic benefits come directly from its intuitive interface and eye-catching design. Now readers can enjoy short, interesting and meaningful stories without being flooded by a sea of information every day. Let’s review the main benefits that infographic design brings to your business:

Attract the audience’s valuable yet limited attention
Inspire the audience to read and share your messages
Boost brand awareness with increased information retention by making it easier to read, understand and memorize
Improve SEO results

When it comes to B2B, infographics also help presenting products, reports and statistics in a more intuitive and engaging way.

Digital infographic

How Infographic Design Enhances Content Delivery

With many attractive benefits, infographics have become prominent in various fields such as health care, education and commerce. However, many users fail to realize the core value of infographic design – how it benefits content delivery.

A Charming Way to Do Storytelling

Have you ever heard of the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? It means an image can convey complex ideas that can only be expressed by so many words.

Think of our traditional way of conveying information: a long article with some images inserted here and there. Do you know this presentation style makes our brain process the information twice? Infographics can get rid of this inefficiency by turning complex topics into simple stories.

Smartdraw says that our brain processes images 600,000 times faster than text, and 60% of the population learns new information by images.
In just one frame, an infographic presents key information illustrated by carefully selected graphics, all to make it an irresistible storyteller.

The perfect combination of texts and visuals will increase information retention so that the messages from your business can stay longer in the audience’s minds. No matter how complicated your story is, infographics will deliver the content in the easiest way to understand. This is essential to your branding strategy.

Infographics in digital marketing

Visualization for Higher Retention

With infographics, companies can share a lot of data, information or other visual charts in a single frame.
A study from David McCandless has proved that among all 5 senses, we receive the most information through our eyes. That’s why you will be more likely to be attracted by visual information than purely text.

Also, infographics are best suited for audiences who like speed-reading or skimming. Even if they just quickly scan the infographic, key information and messages will still have a higher chance to be recorded in their memory.

Digital infographic design

Improve Branding

The world has never been so flooded with information. The good news is with the Internet, you can never worry about lacking new information to read. But the challenge to all businesses is how to turn information into their weapon to cut through the noise and increase their brand awareness.
Infographics are one of the best ways to improve your brand awareness, both on digital and offline channels. Just remember to design your infographic to be compatible with various digital and mobile devices so that your message can be viewed anywhere.

Besides, infographics will help improve your search engine optimization strategy. To increase your rankings on SERPs (search engine result pages), don’t forget to combine images and SEO optimized keywords. “Html tags” is one way to optimize your images for SEO.

Benefits of infographic design

Maximize Coverage across Channels

One important marketing goal is to cover all channels with the name of your brand. When images, infographics and content are shared or pinned on Twitter, Pinterest or Tumblr, your brand awareness will receive a boost.

Infographics can also be used in printed materials such as posters, flyers, resumes and documents. Many companies begin to use infographics in meetings and negotiations. It helps alleviate the pain of information overload due to thick manuals and materials.

Also, to increase brand awareness, try to share your infographics on both digital and offline platforms. By this way, your messages can reach as many people as possible in every nook and corner.

With wide applications, infographics have earned a deserving position in many companies’ graphic design strategy – an integral part of their digital marketing plan.
A content marketing strategy only succeeds when the audience knows about it. A message will only be effective when it is understood by the audience.

Effective digital infographic

Infographic Design: Quantity vs Quality

It is without a doubt that infographics play an important role in a business’s message delivery mission. But what happens when so many companies “abuse” this type of presentation just to rank higher on SERPs and boost their branding at any cost?
It leads to an inevitable consequence: “visualized information\” overwhelms text-based information. And it eats away sustainable content and communication growth of your business.
An unplanned adoption of infographics for all (or almost all) content is not a wise move. Both quality and diversity will suffer.

When a company rushes to publish as many infographics as possible, they don’t have time to perfect their design and even the message. As a result, poor quality images, inconsistent colors and incoherent content will cause a backlash. Now all promising infographic benefits go away, together with your hard-earned traffic and potential customers.
All in all, not every article or content is best presented by infographics. The right mix of presentation styles will both engage the audience and keep their experience refreshed. Be clear about your goals when you want to produce infographics so that your final work is made of meaning, dedication and organization.

Effective digital marketing with infographics

Read more: Everything you need to know about graphic design for foreign investors.

Conclusion

Like any other content format, infographics should be the result of thoughtful combination. Your wise use of succinct text and compelling visuals will together create a unique, pleasant and memorable experience in the heart of your audience.

To realize the full potential of infographics, a brilliant strategy with clear actions must be put in place. Contact On Digitals today for consultancy on the most effective infographic strategy for your business.