By Sydney Rubin | December 9, 2019
In today’s digital age, multimedia assets such as infographics can help tell a story in a clear and creative way, improve website traffic, educate people about your brand and drive click-through rates. Many brands and companies struggle to get key points across to their target audience, and infographics can help make content easily digestible and understandable. While infographics can greatly boost your brand’s credibility and storytelling goals, there are some focus areas marketers should be aware of to avoid having your infographic fall flat.
Do your research and identify your target audience
Before you even begin to design and create your infographic, it’s helpful to spend significant time researching the subject and creating a textual outline of the story you’re trying to convey. Once you have the story created, you can then begin to add graphic elements to help the infographic come to life. Also, infographics can be used in many ways, including for press releases, pitches, website pages and social media. They can also cater to various audiences, including consumers, investors, reporters and analysts. For example, an infographic explaining how your product works may be valuable to share on your client’s website or social media, however an infographic summarizing recent study or survey data might be more interesting to a reporter who covers the industry.
Be realistic about your design capabilities
If you decide to create an infographic to support a PR or marketing campaign, it’s important to be realistic about your personal design skills before you dedicate significant time and resources to the project. Infographics are definitely beneficial to enhance your brand and educate an audience about a certain subject, but they can fall flat if you don’t fully invest in the design aesthetic and how they will be leveraged. If you’re not familiar with creative design, perhaps think about outsourcing a graphic designer who has expertise in what is and isn’t visually appealing to mass audiences. There are also tools such as PiktoChart and Canva that provide templates and graphic elements at your disposal if you’re on the less familiar side of graphic design.
Visual appeal and layout are the foundation of a successful infographic
A recent study from Venngage found that while infographics can significantly boost web traffic, almost a third of marketers think the biggest struggle with creating infographics and other visual elements is creating well-designed ones. If your infographic isn’t visually appealing, i.e. the color scheme, fonts, and graphics, it can easily fall flat. It’s also crucial for infographics to have an easy to understand layout and flow. Most people’s eyes usually read and digest content from left to right and top to bottom.
Multimedia assets add depth to storytelling
Public relations and marketing has historically been a text-heavy industry, however there has been a steady shift to increased use of multimedia in the digital age. The words we use in our content — key messages, pitches, press releases and website text — is important, however it is becoming more difficult to convey a message simply through text alone as consumers continue to move toward a mobile-friendly and digital-first environment. Leveraging infographics in pitches and press releases to cater to reporters and analysts can help garner attention to your company announcement or news because many reporters would rather take in the news with multimedia counterparts, rather than reading 1,000 words of text.