A Picture Perfect Guide to Promoting Your Infographic

A Picture Perfect Guide to Promoting Your Infographic
Beth McEntee

Written by:
Beth McEntee

Aug 02, 2019
A Picture Perfect Guide to Promote Your Infographic - header

Infographics are a great way to synthesize complex data into easily digestible, engaging visuals. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and guess what? They’re right.

Infographics combine design, writing and analysis to help cut through unnecessary noise and clearly illustrate what needs to be communicated. And in the age of social media, they’re a golden ticket when it comes to shareable content

Which brings us to the million dollar question. What are the best ways to promote your infographic? Well, I’m so glad you asked. 

Having a really well-designed infographic is all well and good. But how much is all that effort worth if nobody actually sees it? Hint: it’s not much. 😉

There are plenty of clever ways to get your infographic noticed. So without further ado, let’s jump in and take a look at what they are.

 

1 Create a social media plan.

create a social media plan to promote your infographic

When planning your promotion on social media, you need to be focused. Think about which platforms will yield the most engagement on a visual post and work from there. 

Instagram and Pinterest are great places to start when looking to promote visual content. LinkedIn, while not primarily focused on visual content, is also worth evaluating as people are likely to share content they find valuable with their network. 

Depending on your infographic’s content, this will differ from case to case. 

But, by tailoring the promotional plan to the specific piece of content you’re looking to share, you can avoid wasting both time and budget on sharing content to platforms where its intended audience either isn’t present or is less likely to engage with it. 

Whether you’re looking to do paid or organic promotion on social media, you’ll need to set yourself some goals and metrics. These will come into play when you’re analyzing the results, which we’ll look at later on. 

For example, are you measuring the success of the promotion on the amount of times your infographic is shared, or how much engagement your posts about the infographic get? 

Asking yourself questions like these will help you with planning out your campaign or posting schedule, as well as refining the audience you want to target, and where. 

 

2 Pitch popular blogs and influencers.

Once you’ve nailed down the topic of focus for your infographic, you want to conduct a search for related articles and blogs on Google.

Seeing which other blogs or influencers are talking about this topic might give you additional insight into the area itself, and it opens up another promotional avenue for you.

If people are already talking about a topic on their website, your infographic will be of real value to their existing content. 

pitch your infographic to blogs and influencers

You can also use a tool like Respona to search for relevant content and directly reach out to influencers and bloggers about their content in a matter of minutes.

Not only will this result in increased visibility for your infographic, you’ll also get a link back to your website every time it’s included in another post. And getting trusted, authoritative links back to your website is great for SEO – which leads me to my next point. 

 

3 Optimize your infographic for SEO.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself how on earth you can optimize an image for SEO. I’ve been there. And I’m here to tell you, you can.

However, there are a couple of steps required to do this.

Do keyword research.

To get started with keyword research, choose a keyword or a set of primary and long tail keywords that you want to target with your infographic, just like you would with any other piece of content. 

Say, for example, you’re putting together an infographic on visual marketing, and you want to know what people are searching for about visual marketing. 

The first thing you would see when you search for the term “visual marketing” is a featured snippet. Google uses featured snippets to display answers to questions that the search engine thinks people want answered.

do keyword research to promote your infographic

In this case, the question Google thinks needs to be answered is “what is visual marketing?”

Once you scroll past the featured snippet, you’ll see a “People also ask” section. This is useful as it gives you an indication of what other problems your target audience is trying to solve with their search queries.

promote your infographic - do keyword research

There are a number of browser extensions you can use to help with keyword research.

Keywords Everywhere is one such tool that shows you the exact search volume per month for each keyword you’re looking to target, and also highlights related keywords and other search terms people are using.

how to do keyword research to promote your infographic

Choose your file name carefully.

promote your infographic - choose your image file name carefully

Google reads file names to determine what content they contain. So saving that beautiful infographic you created as "IMG2974.png" isn’t doing anyone any favors. 

It’s important that you name the file appropriately and separate it with hyphens so Google bots can read it sequentially, or as a sentence. 

Like this: "importance-of-visual-marketing-infographic.png." 

Extra brownie points if you can include the primary keyword in the file name. While this is always a best practice, it’s not always possible. 

Optimize the alt text.

promote your infographic - optimize the alt text

Alt text serves a number of purposes. First, if an image doesn’t load for some reason, the alt text will provide people with context for what the missing image contains. Second, search engines read alt text to further understand what is inside your image.

It’s also important to note that some accessibility software for the blind or visually impaired will read the alt text aloud, so it’s important to make sure it’s accurate. 

Construct your URL.

promote your infographic - construct your url

It’s a best practice to keep your URL as short as possible here. This means about five words, max. You’ll also want to include your target keywords – or just your main keyword if you’re pushed for space – in the hopes of pleasing the Google gods. 

Check the meta description.

promote your infographic - check the meta description

Think of a meta description as your infographic’s very own personal bio. How do you think it would want to introduce itself to passers-by on Google? 

Much like any bio, you only have a split second (and a pretty strict character limit) to grab someone’s attention. To make the most of this split second chance, there are a few general guidelines you should follow: 

  • The character limit is never set in stone because Google loves to switch things up every now and again, but the general rule of thumb is to keep it as close to 155 characters as possible.
  • Always include the target keyword or keywords.
  • Make sure you add a call-to-action.

If you want to take a deeper dive into meta description optimization, I recommend checking out this post from Yoast.

 

4 Repurpose your infographic’s content.

promote your infographic - repurpose your infographic's content

A lot of work has gone into making this infographic as great as it is, so why not repurpose some of its content to use the information in other ways?

You can create blog posts, podcasts, videos, social media posts – pretty much anything – with content you already have. 

No-brainer, right? 

Not only does this give you a lot more quality content to play around with, you’ll also be able to link to your infographic in all of the other collateral you create. Win/win! 

 

5 Promote your infographic offline.

People often overlook offline marketing unless it’s for a particular purpose, like promoting an event with printed posters. But it’s still a great way to share content. 

This strategy doesn’t have to be all or nothing, either. There are plenty of ways to bridge the gap between online and offline marketing. 

Take popular clothing store Zara for example. They use QR codes to advertise their sale in store windows, directing people to the sale section of their website when they’re scanned.

Many businesses take advantage of this strategy, like the example below.

promote your infographic offline with qr codes

Similarly to this, you can use links and QR codes to direct people to your infographic from business cards, posters, stickers – whatever you like! 

All you need to do is create a short, memorable link or QR code and add them to any printed collateral or swag you have lying around. 

Certain URL shorteners let you create custom short URLs with a domain that features your brand, which can make them a whole lot easier to remember. For example: 

YourBrand.download/infographic

How simple would that be for someone to read and type directly into a search bar? 

Very, very simple. 

The added bonus of using these custom short URLs and QR codes is that you can track them. So, while you might have previously considered offline marketing to be a bit of a black hole in terms of analytics, I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve been missing out.  

 

6 Promote your infographic using directories.

Much like their content counterparts, infographic directories are a great way to get quality links back to your work. 

You can find a list of all the directories accepting submissions here

 

7 Share with online communities/groups.

promote your infographic - share with online communities and groups

Communities are a fantastic way to share your research with a large group of people with a collective interest (or set of interests). 

One example of this is the huge number of LinkedIn and Facebook groups dedicated to industries and areas like social media, content marketing, design, visual communication and the list goes on. 

Another less common method of sharing content with online communities is utilizing forum sites like reddit

For example, I personally visit the /r/marketing subreddit pretty often to make sure I’m not missing out on anything. Find a relevant channel to share your content with people, and strike up a conversation!

The same can be said for Slack communities. You’ll need to put a little more work into researching these ones, though. 

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Slack communities in existence, and let’s face it, some of them are pretty much identical. It’s important to find the groups that are most relevant to you and your content.

Otherwise, you’ll be known as the relentless spammer. And trust me, no one wants that. 

It’s worth noting that most of these online communities have strict rules against postings that are overly self-promotional. Remember, these groups are networking opportunities. 

Each and every member is there because they want to share their own experiences and learn from others. Your purpose is to add value, not to constantly sell and get yourself kicked out of the group.

 

8 Analyze your infographic’s performance.

promote your infographic - analyze performance

The final, and most important, step in the promotional funnel – analysis. Everything a marketer does centers around their ability to track and measure performance.

Whether it’s a lead generation campaign, an event, a piece of content on the blog, marketers need to be able to analyze whether or not it was a success. 

Promoting an infographic is no different. You’re going to want to see who shared, embedded or linked to your infographic from their social media profiles or websites. 

Why? 

Well, not only would it benefit you to be able to see the numbers associated with these results, being able to see who’s sharing your infographics also helps you to expand your target audience for the next infographic you create! 

 

Get ready to create and promote your infographic.

What are your favorite ways to promote your infographic? When you’re ready to design your next infographic, check out Visme.

Get started with a premade template, add in your content and download. You’re ready to start your promotion plan with this picture perfect guide.

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    About the Author

    Beth is a Marketing Manager at Rebrandly, the URL shortener and link management solution. When she’s not dreaming about generating leads, you’ll find her wandering the streets of Dublin with her golden retriever (getting rained on, most likely) or curled up by the fire with a book and a cup of tea.