Infographics are an easy way to communicate information to your key audience and increase your engagement levels. They have been proven to provide information in a neat and organized fashion that customers appreciate. They are easily shareable and easy to include on your website and blog, as well as all of your social media outlets.
Should you DIY?
But the question always arises as to whether you should create your infographic or hire it done by someone else. Many business owners don’t want to let go of any job that involves their branding. They are afraid that, by delegating the responsibility to someone else, they may lose the ability to impact the results.
This is only true if you choose a design team or designer who doesn’t want you to be involved in the design process. Most design companies realize that the business owner wants to keep control over how their infographic is designed.
But, if you do decide to do it yourself, here are a few ideas to get started:
- Use professional graphics.– Even if you decide to create an infographic yourself, you should still use professionally-designed graphics. Some business site owners decide to create their infographic. But they hire the graphics made by a professional graphics designer so that they will have the best quality graphics. This is a pretty good idea even if you do decide to do most of it yourself.
- Use familiar logos.– If you are going to make the infographic something that reflects your brand, you will want to think about what to include that will adequately reflect your brand and company. Using your company logo at the top of your infographic is a good idea and may help to make the viewer realize that it is a product of your company. Remember that your infographic may be located many different places once you publish it, so it is to your advantage to brand it well before publishing it to the masses.
- Pick an important theme.– If you are going to communicate information on your infographic, you need to decide what it is that you will communicate.Your purpose may be to increase your engagement levels, to get people to subscribe, or to buy a product. It’s hard to focus on all of these things at once, so it’s always best to decide which action you want them to take ahead of time. You may indeed accomplish all of these things if you can produce a quality infographic, but you should still focus in on one goal. Additionally, you should make sure your infographic has a specific theme so that your message will not get mixed up when people come across your infographic.
- Look at examples.– One of the best ways to decide what you are going to build your infographic around is to look at some examples of good infographics within your industry, as well as other industries to see what might work.Of course, yours will be unique and should be different than anyone else’s. But it’s still a good idea to check out some of the best designs to see what type of style you might want to represent your brand.
What to Use
If you decide to create your infographic yourself from scratch, you can use PhotoShop as a basic design program. It is by Adobe and costs around $1000 for the full version. However, you can use PhotoShop Elements if you choose which only costs around $79 retail and is a scaled down version of the original PhotoShop program. It is also slightly less complicated to use than the full PhotoShop program. Also, view any of these recommended design tools.
Technical Specifications
When you start designing your infographic, you should first find out what the specifications are. The size of your infographic should be lined up with the platforms that you plan to put it on. However, there is a standard for an infographic that you should follow also.
If you follow this design, you will be able to produce a vertical infographic that will work on most platforms such as Facebook and your website or blog.
What to Include
So, once you know the specifications and technical requirements, what should you include in your infographic? It might be a good idea to go back to your business plan and look at what is important to your business. Just like your logo, your infographic should somehow reflect your business philosophy and ideology so that people know what your business is about.
Don’t be Salesy
Remember when you create an infographic, you should avoid being sales-oriented unless the purpose is to sell a product. You can create an infographic that presents a product and encourages purchasing the product with a URL on the bottom.
But if you are just giving your audience information on a topic they care about; you should stick to informational text and graphics that gives them information in a streamlined way.
Do you have the skills?
There are a specific skill and artistic ability involved in creating an infographic. Most people can figure out how to do one after several trial and errors. But remember that doing it yourself involves a learning curve that not all business owners have the time to spare. It’s not enough to know the technical specifications. You also need to have a grasp of artistic design so that you can produce the type of work that people will respond to.
A perfect example of this would be if you were a top fashion blogger and had a big following online, but wasn’t sure how to create original content to increase value and social shares on your site. A great way to accomplish this would be through the use of an infographic and turn your best existing content into shareable visual content. This is something we are seeing that works extremely well across a wide range of niche markets. To get an idea of what top fashion blogs are doing to increase brand engagement and traffic back to their sites, you just need to start following them on social media. Once you see what is working for others, you can then apply these same tips and working methods into your own content creation and sharing efforts as well.
Anything you do for your brand takes time. You should carefully consider whether you have this time to devote to doing this right. You can use Powerpoint to create an infographic or create it from scratch in a Photoshop program or other software application. But what will your final result be?
The Best Solution
If you want truly professional results from your infographic, you should consider hiring an outside infographic design team. A dedicated design team will have the time and skill to devote to your infographic that you may not have to devote to this process.
To the professional design team, they do not have a learning curve as a business owner has due to the many other tasks that a business owner is involved with.
Why Infographic Design Team is the Best
If you want a customized, professional infographic for your website, social media, and blog, check out our work at infographicdesignteam.com. You will see that we do four major types of infographics including:
- Standard (static) infographic
- Video infographics
- Social media infographics
- Powerpoint infographics
If you want, we can even design an infographic that will work with multiple formats or convert a standard infographic into a video or social infographic. The sky’s the limit when you let us design your professional infographic. Just tell us what you want, and we can deliver it to you in a reasonable time and help you get your message out to the people who are most likely to connect with your content.
Visit us today for a free quote and to check out our infographics. You’ll see why customers prefer us for a custom-made infographic that captures your brand in a way that nothing else can do. That’s infographicdesignteam.com.
There’s no need to do it yourself when you have a professional infographic design team ready to do it for you.
