The Value of Infographics for Social Media Marketing

Infographics offer a great way to convey information and data visually to a broad audience, including individuals outside the company’s standard customer base. As part of your overall social media marketing strategy, infographics can reach people not accustomed to the technical lingo or common knowledge associated with your particular industry. The infographic helps to simplify your message through visuals, making it easier to understand. The broader story told within each infographic is done using visual cues and data shown through the use of charts, numbers, comics and images; the limits are only up to the imagination of the visual artist and the data used.

How Social Media Fits In

Well-made infographics take quite a bit of work, including research, data analysis of facts and figures, and digital-based visual arts, all of which should be done in a professional manner. It takes a lot of tools, resources, and usually a team of individuals working together to make a great infographic (although there have been notable examples of single individuals doing all the work).

By only putting an infographic on the Web through the company’s website and standard channels like forums or blogs, the audience becomes mostly limited to the already-established customer base. Social media can allow the graphic to reach new frontiers in outreach. Some of this audience may become new customers or viral marketers that will continue to spread the company’s message.

Infographics and Long-Term Marketing Benefits

Original content that is interesting and visually appealing spreads like wildfire over social media. PR Daily also points out that successful public relations marketing efforts in the B2B marketing sphere revolve around original content and the use of social media:

“With a whopping 93 percent of B2B marketers using content marketing, 73 percent say they are creating more original content than they did last year… The data also show that the most successful marketers are using seven social media platforms to promote their content, versus the four used by the less-effective ones.”

Infographics play a large part of the content marketing strategy for successful marketing and PR campaigns. Their value is being recognized by marketers, and they provide the type of original content companies are investing in.

“Not surprising is that more than half of B2B marketers have noticed the value of infographics, with a 13 percent increase this year over last year, ” PR Daily Notes.

Their value, however, may not be as easily defined right away with figures as Social Media Explorer notes:

“ROI is calculated as follows: (Gain from an investment – Cost of the investment) / Cost of the investment… Not every marketing and communication initiative that adds value to an organization can be unequivocally connected to revenue.”

There are tangible and intangible benefits that may not easily be defined by an ROI calculation. Long-term benefits, such as building relationships with customers and corporate brand awareness, may be worth more than figures and numbers from just immediate revenue that was invested into creating the project. Long-term and intangible benefits are the real value of infographics.