Infographics by Andrea Michelotti

In this article I would like to talk about to power of the infographics, when used to transmit a marketing message.

This kind of visual representation came out prominently in the last decade across the web. An infographic is composed by texts and images that gives explanations on a particular topic.  One of the advantages of an infographic is the capability to transmit the marketing message clearly and directly to the audience.

Google confirm that the use of the infographic have increased by the 25% in the last five years. This confirms that sometimes a graphical representation is much more effective than other common tools, like powerpoint presentations, or generic slides.

How to build an effective infographic

You can find here a good article that explains the steps to be considered when building an infographic.

As any other project, the important thing is to have clear in mind the topic. The power of an infographic is that the message should be clear instantly, so get rid of all the things that are not strictly related to the topic.

Visualization is another crucial step to obtain a successful infographic. Images needs to be clear enough for anyone. Color matching, texts and fonts needs to be correctly organized to be easily read from left to right or top to bottom.

To have an idea of the best infographic in 2015, here is an article from hubspot 

that contains a summary of the best infographics found on the web.

Is this a marketing tool?

Can we use an infographic as a marketing tool? Dummy question isn’t it…. Of course we can! In one of my previous article about  13 tools to monitor a website

I was talking about baclinks.

Backlinks are basically links that send traffic to our website. They have been recognized to be important for Google positioning. A good link building strategy is represented by infographics.

When the infographic is ready to be published, we can create a post on our website containing the jpeg file, optimizing the jpeg itself using a good alt tag.

At the end of the image, we can then insert the following code that permits to other blogger to embed the image on their own blogs.

An example is the following one:

<textarea style=”width: 90%; height: 100px; padding: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 4px;” readonly=”readonly”>
<div><a href=”http://www.mysite.com”><img src=”http://www.mysite/immages/infographic-name.jpg” alt=”my alt tag” /></a></div>
<div>Source: <a href=”http://www.mysite.com/”>www.mysite.com</a></div>
</textarea>

This is the code, that will embed our infographic on another blog, will create also a link (a backlink) to our website.

How to build an infographic?

How do we create an infographic? Since this is just an image, we can use any tool like adobe photoshop or illustrator, to create eye catching images. We need also some graphic designs skills, so a good graphic designer can translate in images the infographic contents.

These sort of skills are the ones that you could find in a good marketing agency. If you are not a graphic designer, there are some tools on the internet that can help you building beautiful infographics, without having the knowledge of photoshop or illustrator.

Some of those are available free, and some others requires a payment upfront. The list below, contains some of the services available.

Piktochart: One of the best available, easy to use

Venngage: Free infographic maker that works with nice templates

Visual.ly:  Free, quick and easy

Canva: Drag and drop creator, free