Katy French — November 24, 2017 — November 24, 2017
There is certainly a difference between sales content and marketing content, but that doesn’t mean your infographic marketing can’t nudge people toward your product or service. The whole point of content marketing is to build relationships that encourage people to work with you in the future. Telling the right stories helps you do this, and with the right approach, you can craft compelling stories around your own offerings. Sometimes, these stories may be just the thing people need to make their decision.
The problem is many content marketers make the mistake of injecting themselves into a narrative or crafting self-serving content that doesn’t provide value. That’s when their infographic marketing devolves infographic selling, and they’re suddenly shocked that their latest project didn’t get the eyes they thought it would.
So how do you walk the line? The key to a great infographic is a great story—regardless of the subject. If you can find a way to craft an interesting narrative that provides your readers some value, then you can create an interesting infographic about your product, service, or anything else. Just remember that story is first.
If you’re not sure what that looks like, here are some unique approaches to crafting infographic marketing that puts your brand front and center—without making people run away.
1) Tell the Story of Your Product
Why it works: People want to know who they’re interacting with. They want transparency into what brands believe, how they operate, where their products come from, etc. Creating an infographic that gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at your brand is an excellent way to demonstrate transparency.
Infographics are an especially useful tool to help you communicate your story. You might visualize your production chain, which gives people an education about the types of work environments and sourcing practices they’re supporting. You might depict a timeline with major milestones in the evolution of your product, which shows your commitment to experimentation and improving your product. The key to creating this type of content is finding a narrative that is interesting and relevant to people.
Example: This Nadaam infographic details all their product selling points: how they source wool, how they do it differently than traditional retailers, and how purchases go to help the sheep herders that provide the wool.
2) Bring Your Product Into The Viewer’s Story
Why it works: Your product alone isn’t what’s valuable to people; it’s what that product or service does for them, how it fits into their life story. They should be able to envision their life enhanced in some way with your product. The trick here is not to “sell” this to them but to craft a story that lets them imagine it for themselves.
Imagine the ways people might interact with your product and how they might do it better, more efficiently, or how they might put it to use. Crafting a story along these lines, whether it’s a journey, tip, or tutorial can help you create more compelling infographic marketing.
Example: Manduka created a simple infographic that explains how to know if you’ve found the right yoga mat for your practice. It tells the story of a yogi’s relationship with their mat, not prescribing Manduka’s products specifically but encouraging you think to about the role your mat plays in your life.
3) Use Your Infographic Marketing As Your Product
Why it works: If you can demonstrate your brand value through an infographic, you’ve already won half the battle. A great infographic educates, entertains, or inspires. But most importantly, it provides some sort of value. Not every brand can demonstrate their use-case through an infographic, but if your content can become an extension of your brand or service, you will be creating content marketing gold.
How to do that? Maybe you have a food-delivery service that makes it easier to cook. Crafting a few visual recipes, broken down in an infographic, helps you demonstrate your business’s core value prop: making cooking easier and simpler at every level.
Example: Course Hero offers access to online classes, putting education in everyone’s hands. As part of their infographic marketing, they created a series of “Cliff’s Notes” infographics, breaking down popular works of literature. The infographics became both a tool to publicize the brand and a useful reference to make it easier to learn.
4) Use Your Product to Tell a Different Story
Why it works: Every brand should focus on not just getting people to buy products but getting them to use them in useful, helpful, and creative ways. Telling these types of stories helps convince people to purchase your product and helps nurture your relationship after they’ve bought it. It shows you’re invested in their success, whether you’re a cloud solution or a cosmetics company.
Some of the most effective infographic marketing does this by making the product not the star but the costar in a story.
Example: Kelly-Moore paints created an interesting infographic that used color to visualize the emotions of famous album covers. The piece gave people a creative way to look at color while showing the actual product hues at work.
5) Use an Infographic as an Explainer
Why it works: Infographics are an inherently visual medium, making them a great tool to break down concepts, compare products or features, or highlight product details. People appreciate a simple visual guide as opposed to wading through a ton of dull literature or boring sales brochures.
While explainer videos are most common, communicating product info via an infographic can also be effective.
Example: This infographic for Williams Scotsman breaks down their offerings and highlights their benefits.
Look For More Ways to Use Infographic Marketing
There are many types of content that can benefit from the infographic treatment. Any time you have a message to deliver, consider turning it into visual content to make it more engaging and easy to digest.
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