Infographic marketing is one of the most important aspects of creating content and promoting it online. Way too many site owners and brands think that infographic success comes from just having one designed. Unfortunately, can’t be further from the truth. The fact is, without the necessary promotion and outreach, not many people will ever see your infographic.
To help with this process, we reached out to twenty-one different bloggers, entrepreneurs, and branding experts to get their best tips on how to promote an infographic once it goes live for others to see. Here’s what they all had to say.
What is your best tip for promoting/marketing infographics?
We have two marketing tactics to semi-automate the content distribution process of infographics for our clients:
- Adding Twitter buttons within paragraphs of content found on our site to entice readers to share Twitter-like messages to their followers. I did this for my post on link building habits and got some really good amount of social shares. Refer to the screenshots and examples below to see how this works.
You can see a result from adding such Tweet icons throughout the content below.
Executing guestographics properly, which is a process of distributing infographics to other blogs relevant to your industry, but with a twist on a side. When you pitch to bloggers, you offer to create mini-guest posts for the infographics (introduction to the visuals) – this increases your placement rates on those targeted blogs.
Venchito Tampon – SharpRocket.com
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First of all before thinking about promotion, I’d emphasize the quality of the infographic itself – both in terms of the content matter and in terms of the design.
Now that infographics have become so common, amateurish designs have also become common. So you have to first make sure that the graphic is top notch quality and of good standard.
Second, you cannot just cook up any detail into an eye-catching infographic. No matter how professional looking your infographic is, if the information itself is not good, it won’t be well received.
Having said that, email is the best way to promote an infographic.
Emailing to your existing subscribers won’t help much (apart from getting traffic). But if you want to spread the graphic, you have to email to your peers, and people who have already published/linked to similar kind of information.
Yes, it is indeed some work to do, but the results will be worth it, because email is still the best (personalized) way to promote stuff!
JaneSheeba – JaneSheeba.com
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I think the best strategy for promoting infographics is the same one I rely on for promoting almost anything: share it, then share it again! (And again, and again…)
I advocate this because, honestly, your audience on social media simply isn’t paying attention! The average Facebook post reaches less than 15% of your followers. Only about a third of Twitter users check in more than once a day. The odds are that whatever you post just isn’t being seen! Every time you post that infographic, you’ll reach another sliver of your audience. Plus, your audience should be growing over time – so why not give all those new followers a chance to see it as well?
Laura Roeder – MeetEdgar.com
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The best way to promote an infographic is the same as with written content.
1. Make the content awesome
People will share content that is of high quality.
If you content sucks, why should anyone promote it?
2. Promote the content to people who have the right audience
Needless to say, it doesn´t matter if you have written the world´s best article on how to play the piano…
…, you won´t be able to get an influencer who has an audience that is interested in learning SEO to share it with his / her peeps.
3. Build relationships in advance
Asking people you don´t know to promote your stuff, even if your article is a great fit for their audience, is usually a no go.
Note: when you build relationships with influencers in a genuine way, your goal is not to get them to promote your content. If that happens in the future, it´s just a bonus. Your goal is to build a lot of value for the influencers first without expecting anything in return.
If you haven´t built a relationship with them, why the heck should they promote your content?
They get a ton of those requests each week.
4. Promote your content like your life is depending on it
The last part is self-explanatory.
Tor Refsland – TimeManagementChef.com
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When it comes to creating content online, few methods are as effective as infographics. In short, they bring boring data to life and are in a format that is easy to share with others. To see an example of how I used infographics within my content creation and marketing, you can refer to this one on how to make money with a blog.
At the same time, let’s also look at the seven step process I take when creating, launching and promoting an infographic as well.
- Create an infographic that meshes well with your existing audience.
- Go live with your infographic and at least a 1,000+ word article.
- Make your infographic easy to share with social buttons and an embed form.
- Share your infographic through all social outlets and on your own sites.
- When guest blogging on other sites, use it as a reference when applicable.
- Reach out to other bloggers and sites to see if they would like to share/post it.
- Continue to build backlinks and mentions to your infographic post for weeks/months to come.
Something else I also enjoy using infographics for is to create detailed visual resource guides. No matter what niche or industry you are currently in, there are probably more than enough infographics out there for you to build an expert summary post. You can view a few of these concepts below. What you should also notice is how well these types of posts do when it comes to social shares and actual reads. Everyone loves infographics!
Follow this simple seven-step process when creating and marketing your infographics and you will see great continued success.
Zac Johnson – ZacJohnson.com
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I try to not follow any specific set strategy or formula at Bowler Hat. This tends to lead to a reduction in results or a clear template that can be imitated and devalued over time. However, one strategy that by it’s very nature is dynamic takes into consideration the content of the Infographic itself and the promotion before any work is done.
The basic idea here is that you identify a topically relevant piece of content that has already been very well linked and shared. Buzzsumo is a great tool for this. You then build a related Infographic on the back of this content (ideally which would have not been an infographic itself). Then, when you publish the infographic you already have a list of people who you can tap into to help drive the sharing and linking to of the piece.
When it comes down to it folks are looking for things to share and talk about all the time. Content creation and social media management is difficult and time-consuming. So, if you target the right content at the right people they will actually be pleased to hear from you.
You can take this further as well. Don’t stop with just the people who have previously liked, linked or shared something similar or related. You now have a highly valuable piece of content and that is the heart of any real link building campaign. I talk about the failures of most link building campaigns that miss this crucial step over at my blog.
This whole process can be summarized as – start with something of value and then let folks know about it.
Marcus Miller – BowlerHat.co.uk
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I recommend everyone takes the time to install the Moz toolbar plugin and start searching through Google for infographics that are related to the one that you have already published. These are the sites you are going to start outreaching to. Looking for sites that are relevant to you in any given niche with a high domain authority. They are the ones you should be reaching out to!
Ian Cleary – RazorSocial.com
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Although I have used Infographics in many ways, my favorite have been for offline purposes. I wrote about some of them here.
I find offline infographics work best when there is a complex message to deliver. Complex might mean something very different to a general audience (the public) or to a specialized audience, such as physiotherapists or welders. A good, detailed text gives the information the audience needs; the infographic gives a quick and easy-to-digest summary. This works well for:
· Trade shows
· Business proposals
· Any information related to health
· Annual reports
· Organizational history
· Steps people should take, consumer information
Often these infographics can be printed up as mini-posters. The most recent one I was involved in was designed with that purpose in mind. There was a “fact sheet” with summary information, as a handout, and there was an infographic, with a bit less information and added visuals, as a poster.
David Leonhardt – SEO-Writer.ca
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My tip comes in two parts:
1) Your infographic needs to create value for your target user. It needs to help them, inform them, educate them, entertain them… it needs to answer the questions they have. Without this, no matter how beautiful and cool your infographic is, not many people will see it and find it useful enough to share it.
2) You need to go to places where your target audience is and spread the word. If you don’t already have a large established audience, nobody will know that you’ve published something new, unless you go out there and tell them. Go to social media, go to image based sites such as Pinterest, go to forums and other places where people that may be interested in your infographic are.
Marko Saric – HowToMakeMyBlog.com
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Infographics are a terrific way to tell a story that may be complex and needs to have visuals to help the reader understand what you are trying to say.
Most people think infographics are great for showing data and statistics in a beautiful way, and they are, but they are also excellent for telling a compelling story about your company.
We have used infographics to explain how After Offers works and also to explain case studies we have done with customers. Showing how your company has helped a client grow their own business is extremely compelling to prospects and has a greater impact than just text.
Remember, too, that an infographic is an image and needs to be tagged and titled properly so that you get the maximum amount of SEO exposure. It needs to be set up so that both the reader and the search engines find it valuable enough to show other people.
And don’t forget to add all the sharing icons. Infographics are some of the most shared content online and you want to make it easy for your audience to tell everyone in they know about it!
Tim Bourquin – AfterOffers.com
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Connect with as many folks as possible to promote it, preferably through email. Email influencers with personalized messages, asking them to share the IG on their social networks. Ask how you can help them in return. Reach out, ask, and serve to give your IG the traction that it deserves.
Ryan Biddulph – BloggingFromParadise.com
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I have infographics on one of my SEO blog and then write long-form content about it. A concrete example is our post on Youtube SEO – it’s a very lengthy but comprehensive guide on how you can rank on Youtube. Both the factors you can directly manipulate and the factors that you can’t because you need your viewers to do it for you – have been covered.
I’ve had numerous sites use our infographic there and link back to us. So the method I used to promote infographics in my site is really inbound. Write a post, publish it, make sure it’s searchable in Google and then put the infographic there.
The end result? Perpetual, free and organic promotion of my infographic by my blog readers.
Sean Si – SEO-Hacker.com
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My best tip for marketing with infographics comes at the biggest pivot point, before you even make the infographics.
Does the project have a message that can truly help the reader?
Infographics make it easy to convey information and feeling and no doubt a quality piece helps your brand. When you construct the infographic with actionable information for your prospect, then we save and share it with others, and never forget who taught them.
Warren Whitlock – WarrenWhitlock.com
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My best tip is to make a great infographic! At the end of the day there aren’t many tricks when it comes to getting people to accept things; people accept things that are quality. If you make a good infographic and approach the right people (relevant bloggers / articles), then your chances are much higher than with any little tip / trick.
Making a quality infographic is a lot of work. I have tried outsourcing on Fiverr but it never worked. You need a designer or to be one so be prepared to invest real money into it.
Dave Schneider – NinjaOutreach.com
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The best way to promote an infographic is working on an email outreach program. Yes, it’s time-consuming and can be hard but it’s really the best way to have your infographic seen by the right people. You should first start off by figuring out who you’re going to reach out to,these are going to be either blogs or people that are influential on social media that cover your topic.
I like using buzzsumo.com, they have a free 14 day trial so you can check it out for yourself to identify your targets and moz.com/followerwonk. Then you need to reach out to these people either by email, contact form or via Twitter. This takes a while but it’s worth it. You might spend 5-10 hours making a great infographic, you can expect taking the same amount of time promoting it.
Rick Ramos – HealthJoy.com
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The best tip to promote infographics is to first create a mini version of your main infographics. The mini version should cover a few introductory points of the main infographics and then invite the viewers to click on the link to go to the main post.
You should arouse the curiosity of viewers by hiding the main information in mini version and influencing them to visit the main infographics. After creating the mini version now it ups to you that you share it in how many social media platforms and more particularly in image-based platforms like Pinterest and its groups.
Mi Muba – BeAMoneyBlogger.com
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My best tip for promoting infographics is something I’ve done a lot in the past and got good results. It’s basically re-publishing the infographic on higher authority sites related to your industry, and getting a link back to your original page where you had published it first. Now, for those higher authority sites to actually link to you, you need to offer them an uniquely-written introduction about the subject of the infographic.
My favorite part is that most big authority sites have their posts re-shared by a lot of feeder sites that rely on article syndication. So, everytime that authority site’s post will get re-shared on another site, you’ll get a bonus link from that site. As with any other link building strategy, this doesn’t ensure a 100% conversion rate, but with proper target fixation and scaling, this can be a pretty effective tactic.
Rohit Palit – Techtage.com
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The days of creating text and image content is over. If you want to start a website or blog that gets attention, you need to create content that is engaging and easily shareable. The best way to explain this would be with infographics.
After creating an infographic, the work has only just started. The first thing you are going to need to do is publish the infographic to your site along with a nice article. The article text will help with your search rankings and going after long tail keywords. Since you are hosting the infographic from your site, that individual page will likely get a lot of backlinks to it as well — so make sure the content is really good.
Once the infographic is live on your site, then you need to focus on your outreach and getting exposure through other sites. One of my favorite methods for doing this is through guest blogging and contacting editors from big news sites like HuffingtonPost, Forbes or Entrepreneur. Guest blogging is pretty self-explanatory — if I’m writing for a site and I feel the content is relevant to my infographic, I might add it in there as a reference. As for the outreach to editors on other news sites, this is a manual process and simply looking through the latest publications to find editors that post on relevant topics.
HuffingtonPost actually has a whole section of their site dedicated to “infographics”. You can see a screenshot of this below.
This is a long process, but if you have content that provides real value, there is a good chance one of these editors might include it in a future post. All the work involved in this process is intense, but it sure beats paying a couple thousand dollars for a mention, which is what some agencies will charge you.
Brandon Johnston – BlogReign.com
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My best tip for promoting infographics is to share them as many people on a one-to-one level as possible. At first, you might think this sounds unscalable and difficult. But with the right tools, you can make it happen. One tool I like to use for this is ContentMarketer.io. I can search for influencers in my niche, and then create personalized emails reaching out to them and asking them to share my infographic. I can also reach out on Twitter using this tool.
It’s important to note, this only works if you have a truly awesome infographic that is filled with useful content. If it looks even the slightest bit spammy or self-promotional, don’t even bother trying to promote it this way. Make sure you’re starting with fantastic content that you know people will be proud to share. And make it easy for them to share, by including all of the necessary links and pre-written social media messages, so that all the have to do is tap or click!
Nicholas Scalice – EarnWorthy.com
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My best tip for promoting infographics is to activate it everywhere and in many different ways. Put the infographic in a blog post and share it! Break down the information into smaller “bite size” chunks and write a short blog about each fact. Break down the information in the infographic into single tweets and share with a graphic and link. Use the infographic in a YouTube video with voiceover explaining and expanding on the info. Of course have a link pointing back to the main graphic. Pin to Pinterest and share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Tumblr. The goal is to promote through multiple channels, all linking back to the original post.
Shep Hyken – Hyken.com
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The shareability of an infographic comes down to the quality of the content and visual design. Research the facts, statistics and content before you even go into visual design. Only then do you hire a professional to illustrate it all. If this is all done correctly, the infographic will market itself.
Also, we put together this list recently.
Jason Cass – JustCreative.com
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Infographic Marketing Tips from the World’s Finest!
Now that you’ve seen how some of the best bloggers, marketers, entrepreneurs and branding experts in the world do infographic marketing, now it’s time for you to do the same.
The first part of the process is to make sure you have a great infographic that lays out your content in a professional and seamless way, while also representing your brand well. To learn more about this process or to have an infographic design of your own created, click here to contact InfographicDesignTeam today!
