As our web becomes even more image-driven, eye-catching and easy-to-digest content is here to stay. While infographics are a great format for translating data into easily shareable, fun images, you have to have a clear purpose and plan in mind before you start.

What is an infographic?

Traditionally, information graphics, or infographics, are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge, translated into an appealing illustration. These graphics can present complex information quickly and clearly, and can be integrated into many different forums, including signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and educational materials.

I’ve watched the infographic craze grow (and at this point spin seemingly out of control), and many times I wonder if the designers of the infographic really understood what they were trying to communicate. Their purpose can sometimes be confusing. Are they meant to educate? Brand the company that produced them? Create shareable content that in some way is valuable? If you can’t tell what their purpose is by looking at them, then they’re pointless and, therefore, the opposite of valuable, which is what content is always supposed to be.

Many of the infographics I’ve seen are not truly graphic visual representations of information or data. Rather they are colorful posters, or illustrated signs. I’m not whining here for no reason, or because I feel passionately that we must respect the word infographic. I think that content types exist because different types of information are best displayed, shared, and viewed in various formats. Infographics just aren’t always the best way to approach your goals — no matter how hot they are.

Of course, there are certainly some great infographics out there that are capturing the true value of this medium, and some situations where they make the perfect addition to a content campaign.

Infographic or chart: Where the differences lie

There are quite a few infographics I’ve seen that I’ve enjoyed, and some that have made me scratch my head. For example, Copyblogger recently released what I would call a poster about 15 Grammar Goofs that Make You Look Silly. It’s a great poster, and the visual design does a great job of explaining what’s correct grammar and what’s not. Yet, it’s not a true infographic in that it doesn’t take a complex data set and translate it into an easily understood picture. Rather, it’s a helpful branding piece of content marketing from Copyblogger. So in cases like this, don’t call it an infographic — call it a poster about 15 grammar goofs.

Content Marketing Institute jumped on this bandwagon as well. Yet, its infographic, I would argue, is truly an infographic in both name and purpose. A Brief History of Content Marketing educates the reader about content marketing, shows a development timeline, and also serves the additional goal of publicizing Content Marketing World 2012.

Are you prepared to create an infographic?

If you think an infographic might suit your content goals, consider the following beforehand:

1. Do you have something relevant to add to the conversation? If you’re creating an infographic just to be like the popular kids, you may be wasting your time. People care, share, and reuse valuable content in any format, and the additional work and research it takes to create an infographic might not be worth it for your purposes. Even if it looks super cool, if it doesn’t add value to their lives, they’ll pin it somewhere and forget about it.

On the flip side, if you have a complex piece of data that could use a great visual representation, go for it. For example, the infographic, “How Social Sites Make Money”, is a true infographic. It takes a complicated data set and uses visual cues to educate us on how social media sites make a profit. However, “How to Train Employees to Use Social Media,” is definitely NOT an infographic. It’s a how-to that would be better in a slide format, or even as a white paper. 

2. Do you have a clear call to action? This is a great chart about How to Do Keyword Research, but I have no idea who Promodo is, or what they want me to do with the chart once I’m done using it. If you’re going to invest your resources in building valuable infographics, make sure there’s a clear call to action.

For example, the history of content marketing is an interesting topic, no doubt, but the CMI infographic I mentioned above was created with a clear purpose beyond simple education — it’s an informational tool that does double duty by publicizing an upcoming conference.

3. Can you post it in more than one place? One of the reasons infographics and charts are so hot right now is because of Pinterest, the social media site where you can “pin” interesting content on boards that you create, name, and organize. Others can “repin” your content, making the content feel like it’s a valuable commodity that you own.

If you intend to touch on several important, interrelated topics, it’s worth it to create an infographic because people might pin it on their many, different boards, helping you to distribute your content across the web. If it’s too general or narrowly focused — for example, a graphic on the many uses of paper — it might be difficult for it to get enough traction and spread (maybe Dwight Schrute, from “The Office” would pin it to the Dunder Mifflin board, but something tells me he’s not quite the influencer type you want or need).

4. Do you have a good designer? This is probably the most overlooked consideration with infographics: Some of them just look bad. They lack visual appeal and flow, and the designs are difficult to understand. There’s no point in creating something ugly to add to a discussion. Again, people may pin or share a mediocre infographic, but you’ll get more bang for your buck if you find an experienced designer who can add to the conversation by displaying your information in innovative and appealing ways.

5. Does it fit into your branding? If you’re a B2B marketer and you want to create an infographic that adds value and promotes your brand, make sure the content makes sense coming from you. Based on my areas of expertise, I could create an infographic on healthcare and social media, but if I created an infographic on fashion and social media — things I don’t know much about — publishing an infographic would create dissonance in my online persona and brand.

So are you on the infographic bandwagon? I’m interested in hearing your advice and stories. 

Unfortunately, marketing content in financial services has, for the most part, reinforced the interpretation that the industry is staid and a bit boring, a necessary evil. To be a little hipper and thus a little more engaging to the consumer, most financial services companies could benefit from a content revolution of educational and relevant content targeted to the consumer’s needs and interest level in an appealing format.

To connect with customers, there are a few truisms of content marketing that are even truer for financial services companies:

• Use plain English and not industry jargon
• Focus on what the consumer needs and how you can help them — not on what your company can do
• Create compelling content using analogies, stories, or other devices to make the topics come alive
• Personalize the information for individual situations when appropriate

There are also a few issues unique to financial services to be considered when creating content:

• The industry has strict compliance regulations to contend with. Sharing as much useful information as possible within these constraints will be rewarded by educated consumers who know they can turn to a particular company for guidance.
• Purchase of a financial product or service is rarely an impulse buy. Most consumers do a lot of research before doing things like applying for a home loan, switching banks, signing up for a new credit card, or investing in a particular stock or mutual fund.

Here are three examples of financial services companies that make information available to their customers. It’s a mixed bag of content and style, and evidence exists that there is a lot of room for improvement in content marketing in this industry.

Mint.com

This website started out as tool to help people understand and do more with their money, so it has a leg up on many other financial services sites. Mint Life, linked to/from the Education  section of Mint.com, is where most of the content (versus the tools) resides.

The format is a visually attractive three-column blog format, and Mint isn’t afraid to use color and graphics. The page has space for recent tweets, articles, and links to the Mint Life Guides and its popular Facebook page. As evidenced by Mint’s social media presence, it does a good job of engaging the customers. In addition to connecting with customers through those channels, there’s a link on the Mint Life home page for customers to suggest story ideas, ask questions, or offer suggestions.

• Twitter: more than 184,000 followers
• Facebook: more than 125,000 fans

Articles are readable and relevant, creatively addressing topics that run the gamut of personal finance concerns: Foodie Vacations on the Cheap, 5 Incredibly Stupid Things Consumers Do Online, or Choosing a Broker (a compelling infographic).

This site has an advantage over more traditional financial services companies because Mint.com started out as an Internet site designed to help consumers with educational content and provide them with tools to help them manage money. It continues to evolve with the times and remains relevant with its target audience; for example, it has a free mobile app to help customers keep track of their finances while they are on the go.

Citizens Bank

Citizens Bank’s Money Help suffers a bit from being part of the website of a traditional bank. The home page of this section states, “MoneyHelp is an easy-to-use online resource offering smart solutions, interactive tools and resources to help you gain control of your finances and give you peace of mind for the future.”

Unfortunately, the site is not easy to use. Navigation of the site is not intuitive, and it takes many clicks to drill down to a lot of the information. You have to really want to find the information and work to get it. There is a left navigation bar with five topics, which doesn’t seem to match up to the seven sections highlighted in the center of the page.

For example, the topic Budgeting on the left navigation bar links to a page titled Budgeting: Take Control of Your Money, with a number of subsections and links. Budget Planner, linked to/from a graphic in the center of the page, links users to the MoneyHelp Budget Planner tool. A link for the Budget Planner is also hidden among the subtopics on the Budgeting page. Why the two different navigation choices from the main page without an explanation of the differences or why a customer should choose one or the other?

The bank’s social media presence is not strong enough to truly engage customers in an ongoing conversation. It does not have a blog, but it appears the company has put its social media efforts into a Facebook page as that content is updated (often with company tweets).

• Twitter: 1,144 followers
• Facebook: 18,622 followers

For consumers looking for up-to-date content and engagement by the company, it’s a good thing that the Facebook and Twitter pages are updated because a lot of the other content on that MoneyHelp page is static and dated. Two articles chosen at random —Your 5-Minute Guide to Protecting Your Identity and Your 5-Minute Guide to Sudden Singlehood — were both taken from MSN Money.com in 2008. Much of that kind of information is evergreen. However, because it hasn’t been updated consumers may question the effort the bank puts into any of its content marketing and feel that the bank isn’t interested in being up-to-date or accurate.

Because this is the website of a bank that has been around long before the Internet made customer engagement a requirement, it seems it is struggling to create and make available useful and relevant educational content. The efforts on Facebook and Twitter are helpful to connect with customers, but there is a lot of room for improvement in this website’s content marketing and management efforts.

TD Ameritrade

TD Ameritrade got its start in business in 1975 and launched eBroker online in 1996. It has evolved as many financial services companies have and makes an effort to include a small amount of educational content for its customers via its Knowledge Center.  Despite an early foray into the online world,  TD Ameitrade  has fallen victim to some of the same issues that traditional financial services companies struggle with.

The company reserves the bulk of its content exclusively for its own customers. It states on the Knowledge Center home page, “As a client, you’ll have access to educational offerings, like the sampling below…” There is nothing wrong with having content behind a gate and offering exclusive access to it. However, in this case, by not having much educational content available freely to potential customers, TD Ameritrade limits its appeal and relevance to most consumers.

On the plus side, the company makes content available in a few different formats. On the minus side, the sections listed on the Knowledge Center home page do not all have content in them. In fact, the content listed on the Levels tab is all  that is available to non-customers. Workshops are exclusively for customers; so the tab is simply an explanation of what a reader, as a non-customer, cannot access. This content is not the cream of the crop, either. None of the six webcasts worked when I tested them (on Firefox and Safari).

If the purpose of content marketing is to educate and inform both customers and prospects, TD Ameritrade has lost an opportunity here by limiting access and making it clear that the public only gets access to a small subset of what it has available.

Though it has a Twitter account, this brokerage company effectively does not have a social media presence, and it does not make an effort to engage customers and prospects in an ongoing conversation. There is no blog or Facebook page, and while it does have a Twitter page, there is no link to it from the website.

• Twitter: 1,648 followers

This site could benefit from more active social media efforts and more content designed to educate consumers about finance and managing money. TD Ameritrade might wish to bring its content marketing efforts up to date and up to the high standards that consumers have come to expect when looking for educational content.

What do you think about these examples of financial services companies’ content marketing attempts? What do you think works best in this arena? Where do you see room for improvement?

Impossible, right?

Now imagine describing not only what an infographic is but also what makes a good one. Because it’s uniquely difficult to do this in the abstract, examples are key. So let’s channel our inner Jack Klugman (Quincy, anyone?) and perform an autopsy on a recent infographic, dissecting it to see what worked, what could have been improved, and what features might have made it truly epic.

For this exercise, let’s examine “The 50 Richest People on Earth,” a popular infographic published by CreditLoan this past summer.

The topic

Killer. Its parameters are clear (50 people); it’s enticing (they are worth how much?); and it’s relevant to the publisher’s business of wealth and credit management. Moreover, it’s not a one-off piece of content. A few months earlier, the brand published another provocative infographic titled, “Is Walking Away From Your Mortgage OK?” The lesson here is that serializing content can contribute to scale and continuity.

The visual

The image itself it refreshingly simple. Too many infographics seem to be complex for the sake of complexity. Not this one. The 50 Richest People on Earth overlays the names and net worth on top of a world map. Doesn’t get more straightforward than that.

But then the designer pulled up a bit short. The infographic does little to go beyond the source data (an article in Forbes). In many ways, it doesn’t contain anything that the original article lacks. It doesn’t add to, challenge, remix or offer commentary on the content in Forbes’ list. It simply overlays the names onto a map. Great infographics are faithful to the data while providing a relevant perspective. This visual is, in many ways, too faithful to the data and too literal a translation for the medium.

The design also misses the opportunity to engage readers with more compelling visuals. Data in the infographic is visualized in three different ways:

• A circle surrounds each ranking and the line weight corresponds to placement. The higher the rank the thicker the line. Initially, this seemed superfluous but then I realized the utility: It makes it easier to find the top earners with a quick eye scan. Since this is reasonably useful, it’s a nice touch.
• Up/down arrows depict whether the individual’s wealth is static, rising, or falling. This is a quality element that adds a dynamic layer to the information.
• A bar shows how close each mogul is to a $100 billion net worth. This visual element is useless. For one, the wealthiest person on the map (Bill Gates) is “only” worth $40 billion, so why should the bar extend all the way to $100 billion? That’s $60 billion in “dead space.” Further, 43 of the 50 names are clustered between $9 billion and $20 billion, making fine gradations in the bar difficult to detect at a glance. Lastly, the mogul’s precise net worth is listed alongside the bar, making each of these items redundant in the context of the other one.

What could CreditLoan have done differently to make the quality of the visualization consistent with the quality and relevance of the topic? Here are some ideas:

• Iconography: Rather than writing the name of each billionaire’s industry, the creator could have used iconography to have some fun with sector identification. (A syringe, for example, could represent “Pharmaceuticals”.)
• Illustration: Since the true stars of the infographic are the leaders themselves, CreditLoan could have created a caricature of each person. (Imagine if one of the featured billionaires happened to love his illustration? What would that endorsement have done to the spread of the visual?)
• Context: Data is far more interesting in context than it is as an absolute. Since each magnate is already mapped to a particular geography, why not compare the individual’s worth relative to the median income for families in his or her home country? That addition would have contextualized the data for the audience, providing the type of nuance that is essential for remarkable content
• Interactivity: Each capsule could have linked to the corresponding billionaire’s Wikipedia entry. This step is neither labor- nor cost-intensive, yet it would have gone a long way toward engaging the viewer more deeply.

Data

CreditLoan deserves, well, credit, for selecting a reliable data source: Forbes. Nobody in publishing does lists better than Forbes. That said, I cross-referenced this ranking against Forbes’ own “Richest People on the Planet” list and was surprised to find that the order and net worth numbers varied greatly. The lifeblood of an infographic is data reliability, and this particular visual leaves me questioning its accuracy. Linking the citation to the source article would be a swift and easy fix so no one would question where they are getting their data (and it would protect them should their data be challenged).

Taking this a step further, even though the creator selected a trustworthy source, infographics tend to benefit from multiple data sets.  As information designer Edward Tufte wrote in Beautiful Evidence, “Too often diagrams rely solely on one type of data or stay at one level of analysis.”

It also would have helped to have included a brief paragraph that characterizes their definition of “richest” (Total net worth? Liquid assets?).

As a side note, it’s worth noting that comments are closed in the blog post that hosts the file. Allowing comments is essential because it permits viewers to ask questions (such as the source of the data) and to suggest areas for improvement (so they might be able to reimagine how they depict the information for the next year’s version).

What do you think of the infographic? What, if anything, would you prescribe to improve it?

What is a video infographic?

Why do users like video infographics?

How do I use video infographics in content marketing?

• We were looking for an attention-getting way to promote it via as many channels as possible (email, blogs, social media channels, etc.)
• We wanted a highly visual way of promoting the white paper on our website
• Video was a key topic of the white paper, which was also rich with data

• People like sharing infographics, which extends the potential social reach
• A video infographic is the perfect medium to repurpose some of the content we worked so hard to collect: Some of the eye-opening stats could serve as a great teaser for the document and/or could be consumed by those not interested in reading the whole white paper.

1. Keep your script as concise as possible
2. Consider the size, angles, and animation of your text
3. Have a simple slide background with enough contrast to your text

A quick tip

It’s a meaty topic for such a short amount of time. But thanks to the impact of visual communications, I think this hand-drawn deck,  developed in collaboration with data visualization superstars JESS3, is up to the task. The goal was to create a slideshow that  felt like an infographic, which  is a presentation that visualizes information in a way that allows the audience to consume it in a blink. After all, if value is being transferred, then fifteen minutes is over in a blink.

The session looks at the rise in infographics from three perspectives: What types have proven effective for marketers, what attributes make for a successful product, and tips on how to go about measuring the impact. It samples some of the most interesting, provocative, and even funny infographics published in the past several years, and it unabashedly borrows practical counsel shared in the Social Media ProBook by the single greatest infographics designer I know: JESS3’s Robin Richards.

Enjoy this deck, and I welcome your feedback either on this blog or, better still, at Content Marketing World.

The Blog Tree

Eloqua recently created The Blog Tree, a beautifully designed infographic showing the ecosystem of marketing and PR blogs. As Joe Chernov, Eloqua’s Director of Content, describes, “It’s both a blog list and an infographic.  It’s both practical and playful.  It’s both something to use and something to muse.” Even cooler, Eloqua is asking bloggers to tag themselves on the tree–which has helped to ramp up online chatter about the tree and Eloqua. It’s part art, part social, part awesome!

Contributed by Clare McDermott

Fast Company infographics

I love the infographics from Fast Company’s design blog. One example is How to Make Money on the Internet. The message for content marketers? A picture or image (if done right) IS worth 1,000 words.

Contributed by John Nawn

Flowtown blog infographics

I love the blog at Flowtown for the simple fact that they nearly always jam all their content into an infographic. Incredibly good at putting complex information and detail into one visual image, every graphic has a distinctive quality making it instantly recognizable as coming from Flowtown. Regardless of the topic, if I see a tweet go out with a link to the Flowtown blog, I go have a look.

Contributed by Sarah Mitchell

Little Red Riding Hood Retold

The Little Red Riding Hood Retold animation in an infographic style (by Damaged Rhino) is brilliant.

It manages to parody the infographic style while being an excellent example of it at the same time.

Contributed by Doug Kessler

The Social Marketing Compass

The Social Marketing Compass by Brian Solis and JESS3 is a thing of beauty and reveals its content progressively as you browse around it. This and the Little Red Riding Hood Retold infographics inspire me to have more fun in my work. To do really beautiful things that tell a story clearly and effectively. To put in the extra effort to do something you’d be thrilled to be associated with. And all of these examples remind me to look for different ways to do things instead of following the pack.

Contributed by Doug Kessler

Looking for even more infographics? Check out this post from Designbeep that presents 20 Cool Social Media Infographics to Show the Power of Sharing.

What other infographics inspire you? Share them in the examples below!