Looking for an infographic maker and some savvy advice?

You’ve come to the right place.

They’re everywhere aren’t they, infographics I mean. Suddenly data visualisation has become a major marketing tool – the good news is that they are within easy reach of small business owners through the clever functionality of an infographic maker.

You may have come across the brilliant (and free to use)graphic design resource Canva but did you know it has ready made infographic templates that are quick and easy to re-purpose for your own business?  Don’t worry you don’t have to be tech savvy – everything is drag and drop :-)

Check out the link here

The well established Piktochart offers a perfectly adequate free service whose only limit is an image upload limit of 40MB. There are hundreds of templates and thousands of graphics from which to choose. You can download the finished article as an image or share it via Piktochart’s built in social sharing options.

Would you like to push the envelope with an animated infographic? Take a look at Visme which allows you to add interaction and animate text, icons and objects. To see how this works take a look at Visme’s instructional video

Some savvy advice

Of course infographics are ideal vehicles to share and click via social media and for offering easily digestible information on a particular subject.

The other reason for their popularity is that, of course, we receive significantly more information from vision than any other sense - 50% of the human brain is apparently dedicated to visual functions.  What’s more in this busy world, when most of us are pretty much scan reading vast amounts of data, we're drawn to images because we can process those faster than text.

There are three main things to remember if you are creating an infographic

1. It needs to appeal to your target market
2. The viewer should be easily able to understand the information
3. The viewer should retain the data presented within the infographic

When browsing on the web it seems many companies forget the third element cramming in as much information – a quart into a pint pot – which means we lose the will to live half way down the infographic and don’t care what it says at the end.

Also we don’t share it…

This is a shame because when a popular infographic is shared across the internet other websites may pick it up and that automatically builds those valuable links.  And, of course,  a popular infographic will drive traffic to the originator’s website – all great for search engine optimisation.

Kissmetrics founder Neil Patel offers some helpful and comprehensive steps for creating infographics and says that when a graphic has 6 main data points it tends to get more tweets.  This rather bears out the less is more approach mentioned above…

I hope you've found this useful, why not share the info with others who might find the same?  Thank you!