5 Questions to Ask Before Creating an Infographic

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Infographics are a great way to inject new life into both your content marketing and link building campaigns. They are a fun and unique way to present hard data in a more manageable form, allow your brand personality to shine through and (hopefully) generate a lot of links for your site! But before you jump on the infographic bandwagon, here are 5 questions you should ask yourself:

1. Is my brand established enough?
Infographics are great forms of link bait, but they shouldn’t be the go-to link building technique for a new site. If you don’t have a strong online presence (something that takes a long time), how will anyone find your infographic in the first place? If your website isn’t ranking well, how do you expect your infographic to do better? And even if they do manage to stumble across it, does your brand have a strong enough trust factor that people will feel comfortable sharing your infographic as a reliable source of information?

2. Do I have the promotional outlets in place to promote it?
Content that no one sees is only half as useful as it could be. While search spiders use content to crawl and index your site, if your real (human!) customers aren’t reading/finding it, what was the point? The same is true for infographics. Before you even considering creating an infographic, make sure you have the promotional outlets in place. This includes social media profiles, partner sites, blogger outreach programs and so forth. You want to give you infographic the best possible chance of being found and linked to.

3. Does it make sense for my industry?
Just because you can create an infographic, that doesn’t mean you should. Will other brands/companies in your industry find an infographic interesting? Will your target audience care? Don’t accidentally waste your time creating a piece of content that isn’t right for your industry.

4. Is the topic creative/interesting enough to get shared?
If you are just rehashing the same information as everyone else in your industry that is pumping out infographics, you’re just adding more clutter to the pile. What do you have to share that is new and exciting (or even controversial) so it can get you noticed? You need to give people a real reason to share your infographic. If you can’t come up with a topic that will make your brand stand out, put the infographic on the back burner for now.

5. Who will create it?
This may sound like a silly question, but it’s something you have to think about. A really professional looking infographic is going to take a lot of time and needs to be handled by someone with good design skills. Do you have that person in-house? Will you need to outsource your infographic creation to a freelance graphic designer or hire a separate firm to get it done? An infographic has to visually appealing, on top of having great information to share, if you want it to do its job.