By Janette Speyer and Alison Brown, Web Success Team

People are visual creatures. They want to get information while also being entertained. With so many advertisements and distractions on the Internet it can be hard to stand out, so that’s where infographics come in. Infographics are visual representations of knowledge or data that can explain complex problems or stories in a direct and efficient manner. Cave paintings are actually considered to be some of the earliest infographics, as well as some early uses of pie charts and other graphing methods in the 18th century. Infographics have been around a long time, however the integration of infographics online and in marketing has only begun to take off in recent years.

Why Use Infographics

With captivating infographics, you can convey your message and get people engaged in an appealing way. Infographics are extremely useful in business because not only are they are memorable and persuasive, but they are also interesting. If someone sees an infographic for global poverty rates, it would be a lot more fascinating to examine an infographic instead of trolling a website for data. The best infographics are also very creative, so if it’s designed well and uses visually stimulating colors, it will be memorable. You can be sure that if it’s memorable, then it will also be persuasive. Illustrating an impact is also far more persuasive than explaining an impact, hence why documentaries are so successful in getting people to care about certain causes.

Infographics in Marketing

From a marketing perspective, infographics can only help promote your business. Not only are they concise and informational, but these images that can be shared and redistributed throughout the web. You can think of an infographic more like a potentially viral marketing brochure for your company. If it contains interesting facts and catches your eye, then people are going to want to read it, and more importantly, share it. With the integration of social media and marketing, infographics allow you to tell your story without risking losing people’s attention. These infographics can then be shared on all social networks to add to your level of exposure and brand building. B2B websites that sometimes lack photos can also benefit from infographics by adding some flare and allow your company to stand out from the crowd.

Hiring a Good Designer is Key

If you’ve decided that you could benefit from using infographics, hiring a good designer is definitely important. It requires a lot of thinking outside of the box and takes true talent to translate your information into what is essentially art. There are so many ways to visualize the hook, organize the data and tell the story. It is what some designer’s call “infographic thinking.” It’s a language or a way of thinking that invites the reader to engage in the interpretation. It’s direct, but not so direct that it doesn’t require any thinking on the viewers part. If you can grab people’s attention by using eye-catching symbols, creative graph displays and typography in order to make it more engaging, you can be sure that people will not only be viewing your infographics, but sharing them on their social networks as well.

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