Infographics for B2B Marketing: What's Their Value?
If you want to take your content strategy to new heights in B2B marketing, you'll incorporate a variety of options. In this piece, we're going to focus in on infographics.
Undoubtedly you’ve heard the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words”. We take it for granted that visual communication is a powerful short cut to getting our point across, perhaps because we’ve been sharing images since our ancestors started daubing on cave walls over 40,000 years ago. Written communication, on the other hand, has only existed since 3400–3100 BC.
Infographics have a fantastic ability to tell a complex story quickly, so you can connect with your audience immediately and communicate your point with ease. We’re familiar with them. Whenever you open a newspaper or magazine, or switch on the evening news, you’re presented with information in a visual format. It’s been like that for decades. The online world is no different. Infographics get three times the number of shares and likes on social media, and the demand for crafted infographics has grown by an astounding 800 percent in just one year. Data savvy designers, like Information is Beautiful’s David McCandless, are in demand.
What Is an Infographic?
An infographic is a visualisation of data and ideas, designed to give a reader the majority of the pertinent facts from a page of content in a visual, digestible, easy to read package. While infographics can come in a variety of formats, they all have one goal primarily: to convey as much information as possible in one graphic that is easy to understand and easy to later recall. The evidence suggests people appreciate these graphics, as the search term "infographic" comes up hundreds of thousands of times every month on Google.
How to Make an Infographic That Works for Your B2B Audience
Articles offering imagery get as much as 94 percent more page views. However, if you want this kind of boost, it is vital that your infographics are well-conceived and beautifully designed. There are a handful of key elements any well-designed infographic should have on a B2B website:
It should contain a mixture of text, images, referenced figures, and possibly graphs. This one from Forbes and Samsung titled "The Future of Retail" is an excellent example of a balanced mix.
Every element of the infographic should work together to tell a whole story. This infographic created by USC Marshall called "The Female Entrepreneur: Women Who Run Their World" is a perfect example.
It should be clear, concise, and easily scannable. Check out this example from Mindflash titled "The Staggering Cost of a Bad Hire."
Infographics tend to be attention-grabbing and their often highly shareable on social media. Because they elevate the user experience, creating infographics as one of your marketing tactics can really help with lead generation and inbound marketing. They can support your sales team as part of their presentation content.
You can present infographics on your website in several ways. A flowchart infographic layout, for example, will solve a problem in an easy-to-follow “flow” format. Another type of infographic format, the “by the numbers” layout, is a logical layout when displaying a condensed bundle of information associated with cost or numbers. Regardless of the design you choose, there are four steps in the process to make sure the result is what your business needs, according to Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center:
Know your audience.
Decide what story it is that you need to tell.
Find the relevant data you want to use.
Know how to tell a simple story with the data you incorporate.
Making an infographic needn’t be a daunting task. For one thing, you can ask us to make them for you. If you’d prefer to be more hands-on, tools like Visme make it easy to create good-looking, shareable infographics just by dragging, dropping and tweaking design blocks. They have provided some great advice on how to make an infographic.
Why Infographics Work
There are many reasons why infographics are an effective digital marketing strategy. Infographics can be really effective pieces of content. Some of the most remarkable statistics that speak to that fact include:
Typical website visitors will only read about 20 percent of the regular text on the screen, according to the Nielsen Norman Group
Most visitors will leave a website within 10 to 30 seconds, but pages with an apparent value will keep users on a site longer
Colour plays a vital role in information retention; colour helped improve test scores in a study conducted in 2002
These three facts explain why a colourful infographic with varied fonts and highlights of information help to maintain visitor attention, but how does that apply in the world of B2B marketing? When it comes down to it, you are still gearing content toward a human who is going to react in human ways regardless of their professional credentials. Nevertheless, there are three big reasons why infographics are valuable in this arena.
Infographics Immediately Capture Attention
For a business customer, the process of tracking down the best service provider or supplier can be a gruelling task. One prospect could spend hours sifting through websites to try to find the best cloud-hosted data storage provider, for example. When a prospective B2B client lands on your site, they are going to want information, and they're going to want it right away. They are not going to spend much time reading every single word. Through the use of punchy graphics, precisely arranged and unique text, colourful imagery, and information in a concise way, an infographic immediately gives something more.
Infographics Leave Curiosity Open
Content creators know one thing: you can make or break a piece of written content with the headline. A lousy headline sends people off in search of something else; a good headline sparks curiosity and sets the hook. Which is essentially what an infographic does when someone comes across it. By seeing an engaging synopsis of information condensed into one skimmable graphic, it leaves the reader interested to learn more. The graphic acts as an invitation.
Consider what it's like when you get an event invitation in the mail. You find out what the event is about, where you need to go, and maybe even what you will get to eat while you are there. Your curiosity is piqued—the invitation sounds intriguing, so you go ahead and send your RSVP. A successful infographic does this in a way, so it can be a highly effective tool in a full lineup of content marketing tools.
Infographics Establish Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is one of the core aims of a content marketing strategy. If you have something on your website that is sharable, informative and bound to get social media attention, you have a useful tool to support good brand awareness. An infographic appropriately done stands as an excellent ambassador for your brand message, and it is in just the right format to share with others.
Overall, measuring the accurate value of an infographic is a challenge, but when executed in the right way, these visual representations of your B2B company become a valuable part of a multi-faceted marketing effort.
