By Victoria Green
Guest Contributor
Infographics burst onto the scene a few years ago and have remained popular ever since. This type of content combines images and text to great effect, and you have no doubt seen hundreds of them all over the internet.
But have you ever considered using them for your small business?
While there is some concern that infographics have been overdone in recent times, a good infographic remains a highly effective form of content. Here are five ways you can use them in your small business today.
Recommended reading: Why Every Business Professional Needs to Be a Designer
1. Presentations and Research
One of the best uses of an infographic is to present a lot of information, some of which might be complex, in a simple, fun, and engaging format. When an infographic has been created properly with carefully planned content and professional design, it can prove to be highly engaging.
You can use one in your presentations, white papers, and research documents to bring them to life. Take what could become a dry and dull document and add color, style, and even some humor. This makes it much easier to absorb the information.
You could use infographics in a presentation to pack in a lot of information into a small space without overwhelming your audience and making each new slide fun and engaging. This is a much more effective way to present information than a list of boring bullet points.
You could also turn them into a webinar. Take each infographic slide and use it as the base for your webinar. This is a great way to keep people engaged as you explain a concept or explain your findings from research you carried out. You could even use infographics in an online course.
Essentially, whenever you need to present large amounts of information in a compelling format, you should at least consider using an infographic.
2. Liven Up Dull Blogs
A blog can be a great source of traffic for your brand. If you’ve just set up a business then writing a series of optimized blog posts can help improve the ranking of your website. However, your content needs to be of a high standard to help your rankings and there’s nothing worse than a dull blog post.
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your blogs might come across as boring. Perhaps the topic you are discussing is not hugely interesting, or maybe you just can’t seem to make it come alive.
The best blog posts incorporate media other than text. Images are almost essential in most blog posts, and videos are also embedded to add interest and increase engagement. So why not infographics?
You can use infographics in a number of ways in your blog posts. You could create a whole blog around the infographic. Introduce the topic and write about it a bit, then present the information in an infographic below.
Or you could a selection of smaller infographics to illustrate your blog posts. Some infographics don’t have to be large, and they can be used to get across a few simple pieces of information in an attractive and engaging way.
Infographics are an excellent way to bring your blog posts to life, especially when they are on topics that can come across as slightly dull, so think about how you can use them in your blog.
3. Get Social Shares & Backlinks
Building on the last point, perhaps the most popular way to use infographics is to encourage social shares and build backlinks to your website. A blog post built around an engaging and informative infographic is more likely to be shared and more likely to get links.
Infographics on their own are designed for sharing. Many businesses encourage people to embed their infographics on their own sites, and this provides a link back to the original web page—which is great for improving your SEO.
Because they are so shareable, infographics are perfect for building your online communities. This helps you to generate more engagement and grow your followers. Of course, your infographic has to be really good to stand out and get links.
4. Provide Product Instructions
If you sell products or services that are quite complex, you could use an infographic to break down the instructions into a more engaging format so they are easy to understand and fun to read.
Rather than just providing a manual or a list of instructions, you can use cartoons and short sections of text to bring it to life. You could use images of your product and combine them with quick tips and advice.
If you offer a service, you could use an infographic on your page explaining how it works. Rather than writing down how your service works, create an infographic and present the information in a clear and compelling format.
This not only makes the information easier to take it, but it also helps to build a relationship. When you come across as friendly and helpful, showing you have gone the extra mile, this could help to generate more business.
5. Be Creative
There are lots of other ways to use infographics that fall into the creative category. For example, how about using one for an event invitation? If your small business is holding an event, create a small infographic to cover the details.
Make it fun and engaging, so that rather than getting ignored, your invitation is more likely to get read and generate a reaction.
You could do the same whenever you send something to your clients or customers, like a Christmas card. Rather than the standard card, create a small infographic. People will instantly be drawn to it, and your card is more likely to get noticed and remembered.
If you sell anything related to food, you could create recipes using infographics. Present the recipes in a fun format that gets noticed rather than just writing them down.
Anyone in the electronics business should be thinking about cool ways to pit technologies and brands against each other — think about how granular product features or software differences can be made into fun, visual content.
For brands selling services like marketing, cool content based on the data you get from client websites or email platforms would be useful (but just make sure you have permission to use it). If you’re a specialist marketer, then you could focus on a very specific niche topic like AR social media or copywriting for manufacturers.
There are many other ways to get creative with infographics, so see what you can come up with.
Start Using Infographics Today
Infographics may have been around for a while, but they are still a popular form of content. They have the ability to break down large amounts of information into an engaging and accessible format, and they are relatively easy to create.
As you can see, they have so many uses—and these are just the start. So get creative with your infographics and see if you can come up with some other ways to use them in your business.
