Smart businesses and marketers know that advertising is no longer just about interrupting customers with messaging through billboard ads, tv commercials, and radio spots. It’s become less about how to simply broadcast your brand message and more about how to create meaning with your audience and create a long-term connection. At the crux of this effort is content marketing. More and more businesses are busing content marketing techniques to help grow their brand awareness, customer base, and revenue share.
Content marketing is a crucial ingredient in modern marketing. It enables more people to engage with your business in a relevant way. Offering potential customers content that can help them troubleshoot problems without necessarily selling them on your business or specific solution can help position your organization as a resource more than just a brand. Giving your audience resources they can use – like tips, statistics, insight, and solutions – is a helpful way to stay on their radar without being overbearing with your product or service.
Content – whether it’s blogs, white papers, videos, case studies, or a how-do series – helps you shape the story of how your solutions fit into the lives of customers in a relevant way. It also gives you custom messaging to share with customers on social channels, email campaigns, digital ad campaigns, and more.
One of the most compelling forms of content is infographics. Infographics are a visual representation of content, giving the reader a condensed or highly visual way to engage with the information. Excellent for sharing stats, lists, tips, and to-dos, infographics are versatile, highly shareable, and create a significant amount of engagement with audiences. In fact, some marketing research indicates that creating and using infographics can improve web traffic up to 12%; it’s also important to note that if a customer hears information – such as through a radio commercial – they’re likely to only remember 10% of the information they’ve heard, but when they can see it visually, they can retain up to 65% of the information days later.
Here are some content marketing techniques to help you create better infographics and grow your brand awareness.
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Recycle content:
Audit your current content – blogs, whitepapers, even videos – and see which are the top-performing pieces. If there is information that’s already relevant and engaging with audiences, a good strategy is to recreate some of that content into an infographic format. This is an easy and quick way to create useful infographic content that is likely to get attention and engagement.
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Research trending topics:
Using tools like Google Trends or Buzzsumo can help you find out what’s currently newsworthy and relevant and capitalize on that moment, becoming a part of a current conversation that people are already a part of. If there is current news about your industry or some research related to your business or audience, it might make sense to source some of that content and create your own infographic by taking an angle that’s most relevant and helpful to your customers. You want to avoid creating infographic content about a newsworthy topic simply because it’s trending – if it doesn’t have anything to do with your product, service, business, or customers, it will be more confusing than helpful. But if your content is both relevant extremely timely, you will likely engage with a wider audience.
(Also Read: Benefits of Content Marketing and Its Challenges)
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Go through FAQs:
You can use infographics to help answer questions. Instead of being a straight list of facts and figures, you can design your infographic to answer questions. Where do you find questions worth answering? Ask your customer service and sales teams which questions they get most often and group them together into similar topics or themes to design infographics around. You can also reach out to audiences on social media and ask what customers are currently confused about or want clarity on, whether it’s specific to your business, your industry, or their personal business challenges. This not only keeps your content machine chugging along, but it makes you seem even more committed to your customer base by wanting to go to the source to get feedback about how you can continue to be helpful in addressing issues, both broad and specific. Positioning yourself as a business who wants to do what they can for their customers creates better customer loyalty and does a better job at securing new customers.
Making infographics a built-in part of your marketing and content strategy is both important and helpful to businesses and brand in just about every industry. In addition to helping to create a mix of content that will resonate with a wider audience, infographics are a visually appealing and creative way to organize and display content. By giving audiences a variety of content, including infographic marketing, your marketing campaigns will be more balanced and your messaging more well-received across potential audiences.
