How to use infographics in your marketing

A well-designed infographic will make it easy for customers to remember what you do and increase your chances for quality referrals. Photo / iStock

I did some checking a few days ago and I discovered, to my surprise, that that I have now written over 200 weekly marketing columns for the NZ Herald since 2011.

(I didn't realise it was so many.)

I'd like to give a big 'thank you' to all the Herald readers who have sent me positive feedback on my previous marketing columns.

I'm glad you found them useful.

In this week's marketing column, I'd like to share some thoughts on how to use infographics in your marketing.

First of all, what is an infographic? Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge.

Here's an example of an infographic which covers 7 helpful dental tips.

This was created by the team at Elite Infographic.

This infographic has some helpful dental tips in a format that is easy to read and understand.

So how could you use infographics in your marketing?

Here are three infographic strategies to get you thinking:

Many businesses have a range of services that they can provide to their customers.

However a lot of the time some of these customers either don't know about (or don't remember) all of these services.

I remember many years ago I had a sales training company and I wrote a weekly newsletter on selling.

I offered live sales training seminars that sales people could come to. I also spoke to groups of sales people and shared helpful sales improvement tips in a live format.

At least once a month, I would get a newsletter subscriber who told me they had hired someone else to speak to their sales team and share useful sales tips.

When I asked them why they didn't contact me for this service they would say "I didn't know you offered that service".

And that's often the case for many of us in business.

We offer a service and our customers either don't know or forget that we offer it.

So they don't buy it (or they buy it from a competitor).

Ouch!

So you might like to have an infographic designed that shows all the services you offer.

If the infographic is well-designed, it will make it very easy for customers to remember what you do and this will increase your opportunity for good quality referrals as well.

I'm a big fan of sharing helpful ideas and information with an audience of potential customers.

This makes it easy for your audience to get to know, like and trust you.

This means when they have a need for what you offer it's very easy for them to contact you because you are now positioned as a trusted advisor in that field.

You can share helpful information in many ways.

You can write how to articles, share informative videos and you could also share one or more useful infographics.

I saw a great example of a helpful infographic recently on an event planning website.

When planning an event, one of the greatest difficulties is making sure there will be enough food for all the guests.

So on this event planning website they offer a helpful Infographic that illustrates the different cake shapes and the number of servings each cake will yield.

The cake shapes are all instantly recognisable and make it very easy for a potential client to choose one cake over another.

This helpful infographic takes away one of the stresses in planning an event and makes it easy to choose something like the best cakes to include in the food part of the event planning.

You might like to do something similar.

Have an infographic designed that shares some helpful information for a customer who is thinking of buying the types of products and services that you sell.

I saw a great example of this recently when a pharmacist in the United Kingdom released an infographic that explained what happens to your body one hour after drinking a can of coke.

Within a few days, this interesting infographic had been shared in hundreds of publications around the world.

And thousands of people also shared the infographic using social media.

The pharmacist got a huge number of people to visit his website and created valuable publicity around the world for his business.

One of the keys to infographics is that they are designed to be shared.

So you might like to consider having an infographic designed that a lot of people might like to share on your behalf because it is interesting and useful.

Infographics can be used many other ways to promote a business.

They could be well worth while testing as part of your own marketing activities.

"A picture can tell a thousand words, but a few words can change its story."
Sebastyne Young

Take Action:

You might like to contact the team at Elite Infographic and get some ideas on how infographics might work in your business.

Graham McGregor is a consultant specialising in memorable marketing. Download his 396-page Unfair Business Advantage ebook at no charge from theunfairbusinessadvantage.com.