Infographics—Today’s Press Release
The Why and How of Telling a Story with Data Points
You might have the best content around, but if no one sees it, what good is it for your brand?
I think we can all agree that people don’t have time to read white papers or even press releases. They scan rather than scour. To get their attention, you need to grab them quickly, with easily digestible content and compelling graphics that tell the story at a glance. For this reason, infographics are becoming a requirement with every marketing campaign. They can accomplish in one screen what would otherwise take pages of text, and they can be an opportunity to present your brand in the best possible light.
Yes, infographics have become today’s press release. Bluetext clients are clamoring to take their data and turn it into provocative infographics. But then what? How do you ensure that key audiences will see, and digest, this gorgeous piece of storytelling art?
Here are out top tips on how to get visibility with an infographic:
- Make Sure Your Content is Credible. Team with a research or think tank to develop compelling data points. Credible content with a built in audience base are great components to an infographic campaign.
- Use premium content to promote the infographic. Create a blog post for the infographic and support promotion through the blog’s social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Email, social news & bookmarking sites).
- Optimize for sharing. Providing graphics optimized for sharing is important, so take care to present your art in a very friendly manner to maximize impact. A week or two after publishing and promoting the infographic, upload the full image and unique description to Flickr with a link back to the original web page.
- Tease out the data points. Extract the data points integrated in the infographic and drip them out with links back to the infographic webpage. A similar, but more visual approach can work with Facebook as well. LinkedIn’s redesign is very oriented to visual communications, so this tactic also works well there.
- Leverage aggregators. Submit the infographic to popular infographic aggregators and directories. An example is http://www.visual.ly/
- Put it out over the news wires. Drive visibility to the infographic by leveraging it within a media release that includes a link to the full infographic and distribute through a news distribution services.
- Earned Media is also good. If the data is newsworthy, pitch it out as a story to trade and other publications that might be looking for a good graphic on the topic. And don’t forget bloggers who might also be interested.
- Send it around via email. Leverage email marketing by blasting this infographic to all your in-house as well as purchased email lists.
- Tweet this, Like this, Recommend this, Pin this. Be sure social sharing is always integrated next to the infographic. Whatever the sharing mechanism is, offer them all.
- Animation will take it up a notch. Leverage the infographic into rich media and animation. Look at our latest animated infographic here for Riverbed.
- Make it easy to use. Port the infographic into Powerpoint format to support sales enablement and other marketing communication functions. Publish this on SlideShare, Scribd, DocStoc, and other social document sharing services.
- Keywords are important. Stuff keywords that are search engine relevant. This will help drive organic visibility.
- Streamline distribution. Provide embed code for your infographic to streamline sharing and posting into the blogosphere.