5 benefits of infographics and why they are important

Infographics are everywhere, and yet it can be easy to miss how important they are. These pieces of content normally combine text and data with images and graphics to make a point. They can be used to illustrate anything from a how-to guide to statistics reported by a study, to factual information about a certain topic. Here’s why infographics can benefit your business, and what makes them so important for modern content marketers.

They make information easy

If you want to break down a complicated report or explain a concept that is beyond the understanding of most people, an infographic is a simple way to do it. They break down data and information into smaller chunks, like bullet points, which means your readers can digest them more easily.

This is especially useful for statistics because you can provide a large amount of numbers and percentages without the data becoming too overwhelming. This is not as simple to do in pure text, where the reader can quickly get bogged down in numbers and soon lose track of what they really mean.

If you want to get a point across well, this is the way to do it.

They’re shareable

The nature of an infographic is that it combines images with text. This format is great for sharing because it gives you both a picture to look at and an interesting fact to read, fulfilling two big requirements for the content to stand out on a feed.

Making content that is easy to share will be a huge boost to your business, as it means that more new people will discover your brand. You will particularly see success with infographics on Facebook and Pinterest, where they are most effective in the feed and can be read in a glance. With Pinterest in particular, this will give you evergreen content that can be seen and discovered six months, a year, or even further from now.

They contain all of your information in one go

The great thing about an infographic, as opposed to an article, is that you can share everything in one go. There’s no need to read through paragraphs of text, which can’t be shared in a preview on social media. Instead, the image itself can be shared with no need for supporting text.

This is a big advantage for capturing the attention of people on social media, where generally the attention span is quite low. If someone can see all of your information while scrolling, they are more likely to take it in. This is as opposed to having to click a link to load a new page to find the content, which can be tedious and off-putting.

They make points more strongly

Text can tell a story, but they say that a picture tells a thousand words. This is certainly true with infographics, in which a well-placed chart or illustration can make a point more strongly than simply with words.

Consider this example: comparing something to the size of 500 elephants might not mean too much in the text, where we find it difficult to imagine 500 of anything. But illustrating an infographic with 500 tiny icons of elephants, placed next to the thing you are comparing them to for emphasis, will really drive the point home.

The same is true of charts, where the overwhelming shift in a set of data can be illustrated more clearly by the gulf in size between bars or slices of a pie.

They can be reused

Another great point about infographics is that, because of their shareability and the way all the information is displayed in one place, they can trigger copycat articles. You will see other sites sharing your data using the infographic and writing a short text about it.

So, why does this benefit you? Because your company logo and web address will be on the infographic so that your message spreads much further than you could have envisaged.

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There are lots of reasons to use infographics, so if you have ignored them until now, this could be the time to give them a try. You’ll see big results in shares and engagements immediately!