Infographics are all the rage right now – and for good reason.  Infographics are 30 to 40 times more likely to viewed and shared compared to text (Source: Stew Langille, Former VP Marketing Mint.com).

Even better for B2B marketers, infographics attract attention from high levels in buying organizations. Eloqua found infographics attract the highest job title of any type of blog post.

But many organizations miss important opportunities with infographics.  Here are 6 mistakes companies make with infographic design and promotion – and how to fix them.

Mistake #1 – Have Nebulous Goals… Just Make an Infographic!

Before pen touches paper, before you hire a designer, before you do anything, make sure you understand what you want to get out of your infographic campaign.  Is your goal inbound links for SEO? Branding? Traffic? Social media buzz? All of the above?

Different goals require different infographics promoted in different ways. If your goal is inbound links, often the best topics are far away from the subject of your business.

But if branding is an important goal, you can sacrifice inbound links in favor of driving a larger number of views to an infographic about your business.

There’s no ‘perfect’ infographic or promotion strategy – but there is a perfect one for every goal.

Mistake #2 – Make An Infographic That’s Not An Infographic

Infographics should have two things – information and graphics, combined in an enlightening and appealing way.

Unfortunately, many organizations are putting out truly terrible infographics.  Your infographic doesn’t have to be a work of art – but it can’t be awful.

For example, this “infographic” contains only information, hardly qualifying as an infographic:

Expect to pay at least $1000 for a decent infographic.  Ask the information designer or firm you’re working with for examples of previous work – make sure it’s visually appealing and tells a story.

Mistake #3 – Make the Infographic Company-Centric, Not Customer-Centric

The best, most successful infographics deliver unexpected data that resonates with people.  Successful infographics can be about anything from Ants to Zombies.  They just can’t be boring.

However, some companies create infographics that relate a message like “How Great My Company Is”.

If inbound links and online visibility are your goal, you need to create something that resonates with people on the web so they will share, tweet, Stumble, and reblog it.

Example:

Check out this winning infographic about the Zombie Apocalypse from Pimsleur.  Even though it’s not about learning foreign languages, this infographic attracted more than 178 inbound links.

Mistake #4 – Make the Infographic Tough to Share

Too many marketers want visitors to share their infographic, but make it really, really tough.

Does your infographic’s page have:

  • A Facebook like button?
  • A Twitter Tweet button?
  • An embed box? (Extra points for the one-click JavaScript button)
  • Does it have niche social network share buttons like Reddit, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, or HackerNews?
  • Tweetable Takeaways? (You can implement these with ClicktoTweet (easy) or Twitter Web Intents (slightly more difficult.)

Tweetable Takeaways on a KISSMetrics Infographic

If you want people to embed your infographic, make sure you put the creative commons license on it.  Otherwise bloggers will ask you or worry about copyright infringement.  The best license for your infographic is the Attribution-NoDerivs variant of Creative Commons.

If you want people to embed your infographic, it’s worth putting it on a CDN so it will load fast on other sites.

Mistake #5 – Don’t Promote Your Infographic

Online marketing is not the Field of Dreams – just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.  You need to promote your infographic.

Some easy infographic promotion tactics:

  • Coordinate with your social media team to share your infographic with your company’s fans and followers.
  • Publish a press release explaining the story of your infographic.
  • Buy ads on StumbleUpon or Reddit.  These websites are great sources of social media-savvy visitors who will share your infographic with their own social networks. Even better, traffic on these sites can be extremely inexpensive – StumbleUpon charges $.05 a click for its paid traffic service.  Make sure you match the topic or subreddit you advertise on/in to the content of your infographic.
  • Submit Your Infographic to Infographic Sites

Many sites post infographics.  Submit your infographic to as many as you can.  Some of my favorites are:

Mistake #6 – Don’t Measure Your Results

As Peter Drucker said, “What Gets Measured Gets Managed.”  To manage your infographic marketing campaign, you must measure it.

Your measurement criteria will depend on your goals.  First, develop a key performance indicator based on your goal. Then, develop a technical measure for the KPI.

For example:

Goal KPI Measurement
SEO Inbound Linking Domains # of inbound linking domains referring traffic & # of inbound links reported by Yahoo Site Explorer after 8 weeks.
Social Buzz # of Tweets & Facebook Shares Use SimplyMeasured to record all of the tweets with your link

Use Facebook Insights for Domains to Measure Social Shares
Branding # of Impressions of Infographic # of image file loads

Further Reading

These companies are absolutely killing it with their infographics.  Study them and learn from the masters:

Great Blog Posts About Infographic Marketing:

Related Posts with Thumbnails

Author: Matthew Gratt | Website | Twitter


Matthew Gratt is an online marketing strategist at Portent.  Follow him on Twitter @MattGratt.


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