12 Hacks That Will Take Your Infographics to the Next Level

Eye-catching, vibrant, and engaging – infographics continue to be one of the most exciting types of content on the web. But bunching a few visuals together and adding some momentous stats won’t make your infographic great.

There’s no simple formula for creating an infographic that your audience will love. But there sure are plenty of hacks that can improve your infographics all round.

Here are some hacks that can make your creations stand out. Find out how to better design, research, and market infographics.

Infographic Design Tips

 

1. Optimize the Design for Your Distribution Platforms

Will you be posting your infographic on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social networks? These platforms display images at different sizes:

• Facebook Share Image – 1200 x 630 px
• Twitter Share Image – 1024 x 512 px
• Pinterest Share Pin – 236 x no height limit px
• Instagram Share Vertical Photo – 1080 x 1350 px

Keeping these values in mind when designing your infographics will ensure they will look enticing on all your social media pages.

The important thing is to get the aspect ratio right and then design at a size that can then scale down as needed.

2. Distill Your Infographic Design into a Short Narrative

Making your infographic long doesn’t necessarily increase its value for your audience. In fact, a content preferences survey suggests that many people prefer shorter infographics.

While there may not be an ideal length for infographics, a rule that can help you keep your infographic to the point is to design it as a short narrative.

Give it an introduction, where you state the problem or subject you’re covering. Then follow up with a middle section, where you present the key facts in an engaging way. In the end, sum it all up with a good conclusion.

Don’t pack your infographic with data. Instead, identify the key numbers and facts and strike a good balance between the information provided and the visual elements

3. Make the Data Visualization Great

Often, streamlining the design of the infographic involves removing unnecessary elements from it. Design simple, easy to scan charts and graphs. More than conveying information, they should make your infographic flow.

Infographic design tools today come with many bells and whistles. You may be tempted to add all manner of graphics to your designs, but are they really necessary?

Like text on a web page, an infographic needs white space to help viewers assimilate information.

Most web design best practices apply to infographic design as well. Aim for flow and simplicity in your data visualizations and you cannot go wrong.

4. Maintain a Consistent Design Style

Establish a few design practices for your infographics to make them consistent and more recognizable. If you use the same style in all your creations, your audience will recognize them more easily. That could result in more views and shares.

Whether you choose to use a similar layout for all your infographics or not, you could give them all your brand logo, use similar imagery and image formats, and the same fonts. You can also use the same data visualization designs and styles.

Going a step further, you can bundle up several infographics into a series by establishing a common theme for them early on.

Infographic Research Tips

5. Find the Stories in Your Own Data

You may not be carrying out any original research or running any complex surveys. Still, in your marketing data, you could find ideas for some great infographics.

It’s in your own data that you can find the best ideas for infographics that resonate with your audience. This is especially true if you are targeting a local audience that is facing local problems and wants local solutions.

But don’t look just for facts. Look for patterns. Look for stories. Infographics are perfect for telling visual stories in an eye-catching, easy to digest, and easy to share way.

6. Use the Most Credible Sources You Can Find

Don’t try to fit sources into your infographic design. Rather, create your infographic the other way around: find the best sources first and adapt your design to present them in the most engaging way possible. Proper research is the backbone of any popular infographic.

The web is full of old stats, rehashed research, and links from secondary sources. Improve the credibility of your infographics by taking your research to the source. Aim for .edu and .org links.

Go to direct studies, research papers, and journals and publications. If you’re citing a Gartner or Nielsen study, go straight to the original page instead of citing the news site that picked up the research.

7. Use Trending Topics for Inspiration

Trending topics can be an inspiration for fresh infographics that people will enjoy sharing. Look for topics that spark conversations and generate shares. Some of the best sources for trending topics are Reddit, BuzzSumo, and Google Trends.

But if you are using the latest trends for inspiration, you need to act fast. Seize a trend as it appears and turns it into an infographic as soon as possible. Otherwise, there’s a good chance someone else will steal your idea.

8. Repurpose Evergreen Content into an Infographic

The best place to research a new infographic can be your own blog. Look for popular evergreen content that has stood the test of time. Content with a high engagement level that’s still getting comments today is just perfect.

If there’s not enough research in your evergreen content, add some up-to-date links. But most of the time, you’ll find that you can keep the same general structure of popular content. All you have to do is make it visually appealing.

Infographic Marketing Tips

9. Email Your Infographic

Will your mailing list appreciate the content in your infographic? If the answer is a clear yes, make sure to include a thumbnail of the infographic in your next email. But don’t include the infographic itself into the email.

Rather, direct recipients to your blog or social media page where the infographic has been posted. In this way, you will drive more traffic to that page and encourage shares.

10. Make Your Infographic SEO Friendly

An SEO-friendly infographic is easy to find online. That means more traffic and more views.

There are several ways in which you can optimize an infographic for SEO. It all starts with the blog title/post title or page name of the page on which you publish the infographic. You want in there the right keywords.

Also important are the infographic filename (don’t make it random) and the copy or other text that precedes or follows the infographic.

11. Promote Your Infographic Ahead of Time

Create visual teasers based on the infographic, or simply crop up parts of it. Feature them on your blog and on social media before you publish the infographic. At the same time, use copy to build a sense of expectation.

For you to do this, your infographic must provide authentic value. It has to be worth promoting. If you’re confident in its value, though, promoting it through any online channels you have can make it more enticing.

12. Instagram Your Infographic

Instagram has a number of image restrictions that may prevent you from posting the full infographic. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t publish it on today’s most exciting social network as well.

What you can do instead is slice it up into smaller sections which you can then post one after the other. You could post them all in a day, or over the course of several days.

Also, don’t forget to use appropriate hashtags for your infographic to make it easier to find on Instagram.

In the end, creating and optimizing an infographic may take time. But the visual power that infographics have, make your effort worthwhile. Infographics can really transform your online marketing for the better.