Marketing Infographics: The Definitive Guide

It’s no secret that an infographic is the perfect way to engage your audience. And marketers like yourselves know this all too well.

But what are infographics? Infographics are used to communicate complex information concisely using engaging visuals to give you an easy-to-understand overview of a topic.

In fact, infographics are “liked” or shared 3x more than other types of content.

And according to the content marketing survey Venngage conducted this year, about 40% of marketers said they found infographics to be the most engaging form of content and used it frequently in their marketing.

Marketing infographics can be used for a wide variety of purposes, including:

Educating your audience about your business
Explaining important concepts, visually
Setting business goals and planning your growth strategy
Listing resources, options and tips
Breaking down complex processes
Visualizing your customer journey
Comparing various products, plans and services
Summarizing and repurposing content
Boosting social sharing and brand awareness
10x link building with infographics

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve seen plenty of creative uses for marketing infographics be it increasing customer engagement, generating leads or landing press mentions.

You don’t need any formal design training, expensive design tools or reliance on designers (often with long turnaround times) to design engaging infographics, fast.

With access to 1000+ professional templates, an ever-growing collection of free icons & illustrations and 24/7 support , all you really need is Venngage (signing up is completely free).

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So, if you’ve been looking to incorporate infographic marketing in your marketing strategy but don’t know where to start, this guide is for you.

Let’s get started:

1. Educate your audience about your business with an infographic template

For a lot of businesses, educating their audience is necessary for their audience to understand the value of their product or service.

The problem? People don’t necessarily want to read a detailed explanation of why your product or service is valuable.

That is where marketing infographics can come in handy. In one concise, engaging visual, you can explain the problem your business solves, how your product or service works, and what the next step that your customers can take is.

For example, take a look at how this tri fold marketing brochure uses a flowchart infographic template to explain this agriculture business’s service:

Here’s another a marketing infographic template from an agency that provides tourism companies with branding services:

Pro Tip: Is the above template not disco enough for you? Well, you can always hop in the editor and customize the design from the icons to the fonts and even the color. All of our templates can be completely customized to your liking.

2. Explain important concepts, visually

Do you want to establish yourself as a thought leader in the marketing space? Are there concepts that your customers should know to get the most of your product?

You can use an informational infographic to break down and simplify complex concepts and explain them visually instead. Your customers, colleagues and stakeholders will thank you for it.

Because infographics allow you to play around with page layout, you can design your infographic to keep readers engaged. After all, you don’t want them to quit reading halfway through – they might miss potentially important information!

For example, strategy infographic templates like the one below uses a step-by-step approach to explain how non-profits can better leverage data:

3. Set ambitious business goals and plan your overarching growth strategy

A core part of business planning is goal setting, prioritizing goals in order of importance, and strategizing a clear path to achieve them. This is how you develop a growth strategy.

For a more in-depth guide to creating a growth strategy (with planning templates), click here.

The problem is, it’s easy to get caught up in your day-to-day tasks and fall off track from your goals. We’ve all been there and done that. Especially when managing a remote team.

One of the few goal-setting exercises I find most useful is visualizing our business goals. Using an infographic template in this instance can help you think through your growth strategy for the year and provide your team with a clear roadmap.

For example, you could use this growth strategy template to break down your goals for the next year, three years, five years, and so on:

Many teams use a weekly or monthly sprint to organize their tasks and growth experiments. This template will help you identify the OKRs (objective and key results) that the task will affect and will validate if a task is worth prioritizing:

With Venngage, you’ll find the visual resources you need to communicate strategy, build out a recognizable brand, and create highly-compelling designs. All the marketing design essentials you need are in one place. Check out Venngage for Marketers to get started.

4. List resources, ideas and tips using marketing infographics

List infographics are one of the most popular infographics you’ll see around the web. There’s a reason for that –- they’re easy to create and highly shareable.

You can use fun icons to replace bullet points, or decorative fonts to make numbers stand out.

For example, here’s one of our infographic templates that can act as a simple list to jot down new ideas or tips:

You can easily edit the template above to showcase content marketing best practices, things to remember when sharing company updates on social media or even listing down company policy in an easy-to-remember visual infographic.

If you’re looking to establish new marketing processes, making checklists can be super helpful to keep your teams on track and prevent anyone from dropping the ball. Take for example this SEO checklist template:

5. Brainstorm new ideas and break down complex processes using an infographic template

Marketing infographics can also act as visual project trackers and powerful brainstorming tools when you use the infographic format to your advantage. And if you’re a SaaS company, an infographic can also help you map out your users journey as they interact with your tool.

Let’s break down how you can use infographics for managing projects, creative brainstorming and mapping customer journeys:

Using process infographic to break down complex processes into achievable steps

Explaining processes to people can be frustrating. It’s easy for people to miss information, which can lead to confusion. That’s where a visual breakdown of the process can come in handy.

Depending on how complex the process is, an infographic can stand on its own, or act as a summary for a more in-depth guide.

For example, this hierarchical infographic template summarizes the creative design process (which can sometimes get complicated) in a simple infographic:

Brainstorm ideas, projects, and strategies using a mind map template

Visualizing ideas helps bring them into fruition. A mind map template can help you connect the dots between ideas, and communicate your ideas to your team.

Take a look at how this mind map template connects the different departments and components of a business:

You can also use a mind map to connect key ideas that you want your audience to understand. For example, this mind map communicates what creative intelligence really is:

Another use of a mind map template is to help you organize all the popular content marketing formats out there so you can start identifying what kind of content to create first:

6. Use process infographics to map out and visualize your customer journey

One of the most underrated benefits of infographics is the ability to help you map your customers’ journey. Apart from collecting regular feedback using online forms, visualizing your customers’ journey can give you a deeper understanding and help make iterative changes to your strategy.

For example, this customer journey template uses icons in a creative way to outline everything you need to know about mapping a customer journey:

Here’s another example of what tracking customer journey for multiple user personas looks like:

For any business to thrive (and not survive) adopting a customer-first mindset is of utmost importance. Visualizing your customer journeys can give you further clarity on ways you can serve them better and grow your business in the process.

7. Compare products, plans, and services with comparison infographics

Place two options side by side so your audience can easily compare the two. Comparison infographics work great at stand-alone visuals, or to accompany a more in-depth report.

Look for common points to compare between two products, plan types, or services.

You could, for example, compare your product with a competitor’s to highlight your product’s features. Take a look at how phone specs are compared in this marketing infographic template:

You could also compare plan types, like in the simple infographic template below. Icons can help reinforce which plan you recommend:

8. Summarizing and repurposing content

Marketing infographics can be especially handy when summarizing critical concepts from other forms of content (blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks) and presenting them visually.

Not only that, infographics are perfect when it comes to repurposing content to get more bang for your buck by extending the shelf-life of every new piece of content.

Let’s cover both of these use cases in greater detail:

Summarize key concepts in blog posts, reports, presentations, etc

Part of what makes infographics so versatile is that they can stand on their own, or be used to accompany a longer piece of content (or both!).

For example, if there is a particularly important section in a report that you want to highlight, you can use an infographic to summarize that section.

Or, you can pull the key points from an entire piece of content. That way, even if readers don’t want to read the entire piece of content, they can at least skim the infographic and get the main takeaways.

For example, this marketing infographic summarizes key facts and data from our 2020 visual content marketing study:

Pro Tip: Concerned about whether your infographics will match your website branding? Venngage’s MyBrand Kit (business plan only) will allow you to set your company logo, brand colors and font choices for easy access later. Brand consistency? You got it.

Once you’ve selected your brand colors, they’re easily accessible in the Venngage editor right within the color picker tool:

Repurposing content for higher engagement

If you’re a marketer who’s always scrambling to publish the next piece of content day in, day out; you don’t have to. You can save time and money by repurposing content instead.

Repurposing content is essentially taking any old piece of content (blog posts, past webinars, interviews, etc.) and reproducing it in a different format like infographics, e-books, social media posts, etc.

Creating new content every single day is time consuming, unrealistic and chances are it might even end up being lower quality. One of the many benefits of infographics is it’s perhaps the easiest way to repurpose your existing content.

The best way to approach content marketing is to spend a considerable amount of time making quality content and then repurposing it for other marketing channels so you extract as much value as possible from it as possible.

Here’s an example of how Venngage repurposes parts of our blog content and existing infographic templates for sharing on Pinterest:

Source: Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual platform so it makes sense that we share existing blog content (and templates) and share them visually instead. This helps us drive traffic from both our blog as well as Pinterest (by repurposing existing blog content as infographics).

Here’s a handy guide and toolkit on how to get started with repurposing content on the Venngage blog.

If you’re looking to drive better and longer-lasting results with your content without extra work, start creating infographics to accompany your existing content and repurpose older content to share them across multiple marketing channels.

9. Boost social sharing and brand awareness

When it comes to social media, things can often be hit or miss. But the right kind of viral infographic will most likely help you boost social engagement, increase your follower count and even have a major impact on the number of shares your content can get online.

And this will often result in improved brand awareness on social platforms which in turn can establish you as a thought leader in your industry, make it easy to establish relationships with influencers as well as top industry blogs.

See how everything is connected? In short, with a viral infographic you can essentially kill two birds with one stone (boost social shares and brand awareness). Here’s how:

Boost social sharing using social media-optimized infographics

Infographics were made for social media. They’re visually informative, engaging and shareable.

While you can share any infographic on social media, it’s worth it to create infographics specifically for social media platforms. That means using the right dimensions and level of complexity for the platforms you want to share your infographic on.

For example, take this digital marketing infographics template created specifically for Instagram:

You can focus on one statistic at a time, so the design is simple and easy to read on mobile. Mobile engagement is an important factor to consider when creating visuals.

Here’s a customizable carousel social media template you can use on Instagram to switch things up with your social content:

Increase brand awareness with viral Infographics

An infographic is the perfect kind of content to help increase awareness and even help you go viral on popular social networks.

Earlier, I even mentioned how infographics are 3x more likely to be liked and shared on social media than other content forms.

And one of the easiest ways your business can go viral online is by using infographics. Take for example the marketing infographic from our graphic design trends post:

This viral article has been shared and quoted countless times by influencers and industry blogs in our space. The real kicker: it’s also been picked up by publications like TheNextWeb (and so have plenty of our other viral pieces of content!)

Another example is our recent study on Coronavirus and its impact on the environment. While the post was heavily research driven, we also summarized our findings in a visually-arresting infographic:

Making viral content isn’t easy by any means, but if your goal is to land press mentions and boost brand awareness in the process, conduct original research in your industry around upcoming trends, debunk a myth or prove a point backed by data.

And don’t forget to create an infographic to go along with your post, because even if your content may not drive awareness but your viral infographic surely will.

Use marketing infographics to make expert roundups great again

As I said before, infographics can stand on their own as well as accompany existing blog content thus adding some extra pizzazz to your content.

A content format where infographics can really work wonders are “expert roundups”.

Expert roundups are a powerful content format since they allow you to build relationships with influencers, increase social sharing as well as help you save time in the content creation by having influencers and experts contribute the bulk of the content to your roundup article.

For example, this marketing infographic includes quotes from all the marketing experts featured in our marketing trends roundup post:

Using infographics in your expert roundup can massively increase social engagement and give your website traffic a huge lift in the process.

Neil Patel has an in-depth guide on creating expert roundups that can help you skyrocket your website traffic.

10. 10x link building with guestographics

You already know how important website traffic is when it comes to driving revenue to your business and you already know the crucial part link building plays in it.

While link building still works in 2020, it’s not as effective as it once was a decade ago. So how do you build high-quality backlinks consistently, even in 2020?

The answer: Guestographics.

You don’t even need to come up with new content ideas every day, have strong influencer connections and relationships with industry blogs to pull off guestographic link building.

But what are they? Guestographics are infographics you create for another site and in return you receive a backlink (or mention) from said site as credit.

QuickSprout has used this tactic effectively. They created engaging infographics for their landing pages and blog posts, which people would embed on their website, providing them a vital backlink. You can do the same not only for blog posts but also for the landing pages you create.

The best part: Venngage has grown traffic and revenue by 400% over the last few years with the same link building tactic. If it worked for us, it can work for you too.

So if you’re looking for ways to grow your traffic and revenue, build industry connections, develop relationships with influencers in your niche or even just looking to boost your brand awareness — look no further than guestographic link building.

How do you get started with guestographic link building? Follow these three steps:

Check out our in-depth guide on conducting targeted guestographic outreach.
Sign up for Venngage (so you can make infographics, fast. You can even hire a designer, but it might cost a lot more time, money or both).
Sign up for an email outreach tool (to massively scale your email outreach).

And really, who in their right mind says no to a free infographic? Here’s a guestographic we made for the folks over at HubSpot (which is also a reusable infographic template):

The same infographic template above helped us build a relationship with Hubspot (when we were still a young company) and we’ve collaborated on a myriad of projects ever since.

Here’s another example of a guestographic Venngage made for the folks over at Mention:

If you didn’t know before, now you know our secret to building high-quality backlinks and relationships with companies in our industry at the same time.

Marketing infographics are more than just pretty visuals

Congratulations for making it through this massive guide, you now know just how important a marketing infographic can be when it comes to goal setting, going viral, increasing web traffic or even as a way to organize your company affairs.

As you start creating more and more infographics, you’ll find more opportunities to communicate visually with your customers and team, build highly-relevant backlinks as well as develop relationships with companies and influencers in your industry.

As I said earlier in this guide, when it comes to using infographics in marketing, the sky’s the limit. And incorporating infographics in your marketing strategy is what will set your company apart from the competition.

What was your favourite marketing infographic tip? How have you incorporated infographics in your marketing strategy? Drop them in the comments below and let’s talk about it!