Digital marketing is a multifaceted thing that incorporates written content, emails, social media posts, and all kinds of other techniques. It’s therefore a bit difficult to recommend one tactic over another, as not all of your customers will respond to one particular mode of outreach. However, infographics, i.e. a type of visual story-telling, never seem to go out of fashion – but do they actually work?
Visualising Complex Information
The main advantage of infographics over text is that they provide an easy way to deconstruct complex messages. The technology website ExpressVPN demonstrated this by creating a family tree for the Targaryen family of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, something that would normally take George R. R. Martin pages to explain, as there are nearly forty different members.
For newcomers, an infographic can provide an ideal jumping-on point for viewers who are unfamiliar with the source material. While knowing who came before who in the Targaryan line still won’t mean a great deal to first-time watchers, graphics can still provide reference material to ease the transition from simple curiosity to ravenous consumption. This is part of the reason why they remain so popular in marketing campaigns.
Related to this is the shareability of infographics. Just like social media posts, people will share interesting content with friends even if they have little to no experience with the company that posted them. Latching onto pop culture in some way, as in the Game of Thrones example, is the easiest way to make this happen and connect with as large an audience as possible.
An Exact Science
Oddly enough, the power of infographics may all come from their use of color. The Xerox print company attributes all sorts of positive things to color in marketing, including an increase in brand recognition and even sales by 80%. Put another way, keeping your usual brand identity intact in all your marketing materials can make them instantly recognizable even from a distance.
Courtesy of their longevity, there’s now an exact science to infographics, which makes them accessible even to the most graphically-inept marketer. The marketing agency Contently identified the ideal example of an infographic as having 396 words. It should also stand 3,683 pixels tall by 804 pixels wide. In addition, identifiable color schemes were present in 73% of the 1,000 infographics analyzed by the company.
Ultimately, infographics are a relatively easy way to boost knowledge of your brand with often irrelevant concepts, like TV shows. They can be expanded as your experience with them grows, too, with both video infographics and interactive variants finding an audience on the web. This keeps this type of messaging relevant to all sorts of industries, products, and audiences.
So, to answer the question in the title, following a boom period in the mid-late 2010s, the importance of infographics in digital marketing remains unchanged. The only difficulty you might encounter when using them is finding information that makes a compelling attraction for your customers. Should you dedicate something to your brand or engage with the latest pop culture fad?
