In the days of social media marketing, infographics have become the leading method of marketing and promotion. They allow businesses to show off their authority online by sharing data-driven ideas with their audience.
I have had the privilege of designing half a dozen infographics for our company alone. I can safely say that they are an effective way to get a message broadcast to an existing audience and drive brand awareness.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to get started creating an infographic. You’ll see just how quick and easy it is to get your first one up and running.
Pick a Subject You Want to Create an Infographic For
When you choose exactly what information you want to portray on your graphic, you want to ensure it is of the highest quality.
My company is in the business of providing online scheduling, marketing and business management for appointment-based businesses. In this example, we tried to convey how effective it was for wellness and medical clinics to use online booking systems within their practice.
To source data, we went out and found some great statistics to display (here are some great sources). We used stats that service providers could relate to, then highlighted how features and functionalities of online scheduling can help benefit them. We even further peaked their interest by showing them how other appointment-based businesses were taking advantage of these benefits too. Infographics allow all of this info to be visually presented in an easy-to-follow manner.
Be sure that your infographic is shareable too, as it’s one of the easiest forms of content to post on the web. Do a keyword search in your niche to find out what topics people are searching for. This way, you know that there’s traffic to share your content to once it’s produced.
List Out All the Data You Want to Present
The point of an infographic is to present raw data in a visually captivating way. Open up a word processing document and start creating topic headers and sub-headers of the data you’ll present in each section.
For example, if you’re going to talk about the best hockey sticks of 2017, you can break the data up into types of sticks, then dive deeper into the different brands. You can even include data that reflects which professional hockey players are using those exact sticks.
When we created our medical practice infographic, we went out and found websites on Google that had done studies before. Think of the research and data collection phase as putting all your evidence together on why your data points are valid, and be sure to include where you sourced your information from.
Remember, the whole point of creating an infographic is to make it fun and interesting so that it will be shared amongst your audience.
Start Designing Your Masterpiece
This is where your creative juices start to flow. Creating an infographic doesn’t have to be a difficult process. As long as you have the right tools, you can create almost anything. One tool we use to create infographics is Canva. It’s free to use and they have plenty of templates to help you get started.
When creating our infographics, we always remember the problem we are trying to solve for the viewer. Moreover, we break up the sections into digestible portions and keep related information together. We also use captivating colors, like blue.
Once you’re done adding your content, images and data, you can export the infographic as a PDF or JPEG. Then, add it to your social media channels and website. Make sure to upload it to Pinterest as well, as it’s a great place for visual content like this.
Creating infographics is much easier than it appears. Just ensure that you’ve planned out your data and design in advance to achieve the best results.
A version of this post originally appeared on the author’s blog.
