Infographics: How to Guarantee Content Marketing Success

7 Steps to Ensure Your Infographic Is A Winner

Infographics are content marketing magnets. They reduce text to visual content while simplifying complex information into an easy-to-digest format. As a result, they magically seem to build your brand and position you as a thought leader. The reality is that infographic success requires more than attractive content.

Like any strong piece of content marketing, a successful infographic requires a well-defined plan. Here are the seven steps to ensure that your infographic is a winner.

1. Determine clear business goals for your infographic.

Questions to answer: What do you want to achieve with this piece of content and how will it move your business towards its objectives?

Many content marketers skip this step. They just dive into building an infographic without considering what they’re trying to achieve. “We need an infographic” isn’t the right reason for spending the time to create and merchandise your infographic. Instead, think specific and measurable in terms of generating traffic, links, leads, and building thought leadership.

2. Know your infographic’s audience (aka KYA).

Questions to answer: Who do you want your infographic to reach and what do you want them to do?

Understand that these people may not be your business’ target customers. To help you develop your infographic be as specific as possible. Create both a marketing persona and social media persona.

3. Plan and develop your infographic.

Question to answer: What information need does our audience want answered?

This step involves building your infographic to achieve your objectives. Here are eleven steps to creating a magnetic infographic.

4. Create content related to your infographic.

Question to answer: What additional information does this audience need to know to help build their enthusiasm for your infographic?

An infographic isn’t an island in your content marketing offering. [TWEET THIS]

What other forms of content can be created once you’ve done the work of researching the topic. Plan for this additional content in your editorial calendar to ensure that its release is coordinated and that you have enough staff and related support. Here’s a list of content options.

Blog post(s) or guest blog posts.
Articles on your website or third party sites.
Presentation.
White paper.
e-book.

5. Determine your infographic’s distribution plan.

Question to answer: Where will you place your infographic to maximize results?

Think of this as a media plan tailored to delivering your infographic to the widest audience for this select information. Use a combination of owned, social media and third party media. Also, supplement these efforts with PR support, particularly media relations.

Owned media options.

Blog. At a minimum, use the infographic as a separate blog post. If you’ve got additional information consider a series of related posts each highlighting a different aspect of the infographic (or data graphic).
Website. Give the infographic context by placing it in the area of your website where it makes sense and add related content. Also, promote it on other sections of your website.
Emailing. Share your infographic in your various emailings.

Social media.

Slideshare. Place your infographic on Slideshare to increase visibility.
LinkedIn. Share your infographic on LinkedIn. Don’t overlook sharing it with relevant groups
Twitter. Break your infograhic into tweetable chunks and space these tweets out.
Facebook. Share your infographic on your Facebook page.
Google+. Share your infographic on Google+.
Flickr. Break your infographic into data graphics and share them on Flickr.
Pinterest. Break your infographic into data graphics and share them on Pinterest.

Third party.

Press release. Create a search and social media optimized release to expand your placement. Remember some people read press releases in lieu of news articles.
Infographic directories. (Hat tip to Neil Patel for this idea.)
Press and blogger outreach. Share your infographic with media entities and blogs that cover your infographic’s topic. You can do this yourself or ask your PR department or firm to handle this for you.
Write articles and/or guest blog posts. Use your infographic as the heart of a guest blog post or article in a relevant publication. Don’t overlook business associations.

6. Increase your infographic’s shareability.

Question to answer: How can we help our audience to broaden the infographic’s reach?

You’re goal is to give your infographic wings to paraphrase Ann Handley of MarketingProfs. Remember you want to make it easy to share so that readers don’t need to think about passing it along.

Include embed code. Facilitate publication by doing the work for others.
Add a call-to-action. Remind readers to share, comment on or publish your infographic.
Use social sharing buttons. Don’t forget to include Pinterest. It may not be part of your regular offering. I recommend adding them top and bottom especially if your infographic is long.
Incorporate Twitter bait in your infographic. Use ClickToTweet to draw attention to the preset tweets.

7. Track your infographic’s success.

Question to answer: What metrics will you measure?

The metrics should flow directly from your goals. Further, before you distribute your infographic, make sure that you’ve provided a way to track your results with special tracking codes and targeted landing pages.

Infographics are a great way to position your business, increase traffic and support search optimization. To successfully achieve your business objectives for this piece of content marketing, you need more than a great infographic.

What has your experience been using infographics? What’s worked and what hasn’t worked?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pikerslanefarm/2749717781/