Infographics are an excellent way to breathe new life into your content marketing and link building efforts. They provide a fun and distinctive way to share complex data in a simpler format, showcase your brand’s personality, and ideally, attract many links to your site! However, before you dive into creating infographics, here are 5 questions to consider:
1. Is my brand established enough?
Infographics can attract links, but they shouldn’t be the main link-building method for a new site. If you lack a solid online presence (which takes time to build), how will anyone discover your infographic? If your site isn’t ranking well, how can you expect your infographic to perform better? Even if someone finds it, does your brand have enough credibility for people to share your infographic as a trustworthy source?
2. Do I have the promotional outlets in place to promote it?
Content that no one sees is only half as useful as it could be. While search spiders use content to crawl and index your site, if your real (human!) customers aren’t reading/finding it, what was the point? The same is true for infographics. Before you even considering creating an infographic, make sure you have the promotional outlets in place. This includes social media profiles, partner sites, blogger outreach programs and so forth. You want to give you infographic the best possible chance of being found and linked to.
3. Does it make sense for my industry?
Just because you can create an infographic, that doesn’t mean you should. Will other brands/companies in your industry find an infographic interesting? Will your target audience care? Don’t accidentally waste your time creating a piece of content that isn’t right for your industry.
4. Is the topic creative/interesting enough to get shared?
If you are just rehashing the same information as everyone else in your industry that is pumping out infographics, you’re just adding more clutter to the pile. What do you have to share that is new and exciting (or even controversial) so it can get you noticed? You need to give people a real reason to share your infographic. If you can’t come up with a topic that will make your brand stand out, put the infographic on the back burner for now.
5. Who will create it?
This may sound like a silly question, but it’s something you have to think about. A really professional looking infographic is going to take a lot of time and needs to be handled by someone with good design skills. Do you have that person in-house? Will you need to outsource your infographic creation to a freelance graphic designer or hire a separate firm to get it done? An infographic has to visually appealing, on top of having great information to share, if you want it to do its job.