How to Create an Infographic in 5 Steps

Infographics are becoming more popular. They are superb tools used to convey a lot of information in a concise and easy-to-understand way. This is helpful online, as people tend to be too lazy to read written content in any kind of detail.

Because of this fact, infographics offer many benefits from a digital marketing point of view. These include better UX metrics on your site, better organic visibility and improved social media engagement.

With that in mind, we’ll be looking at a step-by-step process for creating infographics. First, though, let’s start with the basics.

What is an Infographic?

An infographic is a pictogram. This means it combines summary text bullet-point ideas with interesting and eye-catching visuals. An average person can spend just a few minutes reading an infographic and get a nice overview of what may otherwise be a very complex subject.

Colourful infographics help people process information. Care needs to be taken in the infographic design to avoid excessive clutter that makes it hard to read. The infographic content needs to be factual, interesting, and useful.

Studies reported by Xerox show that people are up to 25 times more likely to comprehend information when shown using pictograms. The reader’s attention span is increased to 82% when infographics are used instead of just plain text.

An infographic is also helpful when giving public presentations about a particular concept. While the details of the infographic are explained by the presenter to the audience, the attractive visuals make it easy to follow along.

Moreover, the infographic serves as an outline guide for the presenter to help make sure the topic is covered logically and organised without leaving out a discussion of important parts of the lecture or presentation.

What are Good Subjects for an Infographic?

Almost any subject can make an infographic. Concepts supported by bullet lists of statistics are great to present as an infographic. The idea is to convey the complex subject in understandable parts and, somewhat like an outline presentation, show them in a logical order that is easy to comprehend.

How to Create an Infographic: Step-By-Step Guide

There are essentially six steps to creating an effective infographic. Let’s take a look at each in turn.

Step 1: Review the Raw Content and Highlight the Key Elements

The first step is figuring out what you want to create an infographic about. This is harder than you might think. Essentially, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the topic so that you can pull out the key information for users.

Say, for example, we want to create an infographic that convinces people to invest in SEO for their business website. The key information that we want to present in our infographic would be as follows:

Internet marketing includes having a web presence designed well for search engine optimization (SEO) and links to social media for maximum impact.

Companies need an internet marketing strategy that includes website development for ease of use and proper display on mobile devices, plus continual SEO efforts to increase organic search engine results and achieve high rankings on the search engine results page (SERP).

Companies benefit from having an Internet marketing strategy that monetizes customer behaviour in support of long-term strategic goals. To be successful, a company must identify the target market and be able to determine the best methods to reach them.

These methods usually are a combination of attracting attention by providing high-quality content, paid advertising campaigns, social media influence, brand awareness efforts, and customer retention and reward programs.

Step 2: Extract the Key Elements

Once you understand the overall message you’d like to get across to the readers, it’s time to start paring this down to key points. The idea here is to tie what you’re trying to say to the readers’ overall goals.

Since our example is a B2B infographic, this means tying our subject matter to the profitability of a business.

So, in our SEO example, we might want to tie the following elements to the business’ profitability:

• Internet marketing,
• Web presence,
• Search engine optimization,
• Social media,
• Website ease of use,
• Proper display on mobile devices,
• Organic search engine results.

Step 3: Organize the Key Elements Into Logical Groups

Next, our goal is to break each of the elements we want to tie to profitability into more discrete variables. In other words, we’ll break down each of these ideas into measurable variables so that we can quantify them and establish a link between them and revenue.

Here are a few examples:

Internet Marketing:

• Web presence – Site traffic and content variables.
• Search engine optimization – Keyword data.
• Social media – Ad spend.

Strategic Goals

• Target market.
• Audience behaviour.
• Brand awareness.

Step 4: Find Data for Your Infographic

Next, it’s time to start pulling together the data you’ll use in your infographic. The most compelling infographics present an indisputable statistical link between the topic and the goal.

This requires good data. Essentially, you have two options for sourcing data for your infographics:

1. Conducting original research,
2. Relying on existing data.

Researching original data isn’t as complicated as you might think. In fact, most businesses these days have all kinds of data at their disposal. For example, you’re probably already tracking how users use your site in Google Analytics.

You might pull similar data from other business analysis tools.

Even if you don’t have this data already on hand, you can easily survey your customers.

Alternatively, you might choose to use existing data. Simply create a visually appealing infographic using open-source data and credit its owner.

Step 5: Add Graphics

Be sure to select graphics and create a layout that makes it easy to read, with plenty of white space. Display a thumbnail image version on a clickable web page to see a zoomed version. Also, offer the infographic as a downloadable pdf file.

Be sure to have contact information about the organization at the bottom of the infographic and, when appropriate, have a call to action.

Response to the call-to-action increases by using incentives, such as offering a downloadable white paper for an email sign-up or a discount on the next purchase.

Conclusion

To summarise, the key steps to creating an effective infographic are:

1. Review raw content and highlight key elements.
2. Extract the key elements.
3. Categorize the content into logical groups.
4. Find statistics to support the concepts.
5. Add graphics.

Publish the infographics in all media, including on websites, blogs, and social media, and send a copy to the organisation’s opt-in email list.

Infographics are easy to understand and easy to forward to others. This makes it a very convenient way to communicate with customers and potential clients. Organizations that publish infographics frequently become an authority on a specific niche topic.

A popular method of dissemination of infographics is allowing the right to republish on other websites as long as credit is given to the original source.