17 Infographic Ideas to Raise Your Content-Marketing Game

Visual content helps increase audience engagement — and infographics have become an integral component of effective content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

But now that everyone is making infographics, it’s more difficult to cut through the clutter. To capture the audience’s attention and leverage the strength of this content format, you need to identify the right infographic topic ideas and support them with the right infographic type.

Let’s find out how to leverage the 12 common infographic types and 17 killer infographic ideas to take advantage of the benefits of this content format, so you can increase audience engagement and drive website traffic.

What Is an Infographic?

Infographics are visual representations of information or data using a collection of imagery and charts with minimal text. 

They provide an overview of a topic, communicate concepts, explain processes, illustrate data from research and surveys, summarize key points of a blog post or report, compare options and raise awareness about an issue.

What Makes a Good Infographic?

An infographic, as a visual communication tool, should be unique and creative to grab the viewer’s attention. Besides generating excitement and engagement, it should help the readers understand and remember the content.

An effective infographic is well-designed, well-structured, visually appealing, succinct, accurate and well-researched. It tells a compelling story, takes the reader’s eyes through a predefined path, shares a new perspective on a topic and offers practical value.

The Benefits of Marketing Infographics

Infographics are a highly effective marketing communication tool because they can capture attention and make information easy to remember. Here are some of the key advantages and how to leverage them effectively:

• According to Thermopylea, our brain processes visuals up to 60,000 times faster than text, so infographics can communicate complex concepts and data with fewer words. They can keep the audience engaged and encourage more people to consume your content.
• Infographics are a great visualization tool that allows you to leverage the power of data-driven storytelling. You can cultivate relationships with your readers while making your content more memorable.
• Infographics make complex information easy to digest. They can complement a long blog post by offering a different way for the audience to consume the content or summarizing the key points so readers can use it for easy reference.
• Many content creators like to include infographics in their articles. When you post an original and high-quality infographic, other relevant sites may link to it. This helps build backlinks that’ll improve your site’s SEO.
• Posts accompanied by compelling infographics are more likely to be shared on social media. Infographics can help you reach a larger audience and increase brand awareness while driving high-quality traffic to your website. 
• Since they’re highly shareable and linkable, you can combine compelling infographics with an effective outreach strategy to gain exposure to a larger audience, build brand recognition and increase engagement.

The Most Effective Types of Infographics

The appropriate infographic format can help you effectively communicate your ideas and engage your audience. Here are 12 common types of infographics:

1. A chart, such as a pie, line or bar chart, visualizes a single set of data. 
2. A mixed-chart infographic uses a variety of charts to display multiple sets of data.
3. A list infographic consists mostly of text that provides information on a specific subject.
4. A number visualization infographic supports statistics with images to give a sense of scale.
5. A how-to guide shows readers specific instructions, often in a step-by-step format.
6. An anatomical infographic shows how something is structured or works.
7. A location infographic uses a map to visualize data related to geographic regions.
8. A timeline illustrates how a subject has evolved over time.
9. A flow chart is often used to illustrate a workflow or a decision-making process.
10. A comparison infographic helps the reader compare and contrast different subjects.
11. A hierarchical infographic (e.g., a pyramid) stacks subtopics based on predefined criteria.
12. A photo-based infographic combines photographs and text to explain a topic.

17 Infographic Ideas to Engage Your Audience

What topics should you choose for your infographic to deliver value and engage your audience? 

Here are 17 ideas and infographic examples to get your creative juice flowing:

1. Industry Trends

You read and talk about your industry all day, every day, so you probably have developed quite a few insights about what’s happening and where it’s heading. You can combine statistics, observations, expert opinions, and your interpretations to create infographics that illustrate valuable information while sharing your unique perspective.

This infographic from Microsoft shares consumer trends and how the audience can leverage the insights.

2. Social and Cultural Trends

Many research institutions, such as Pew Research, release studies on various topics related to the larger social and cultural environment. From demographic data to social opinion polls, you can tie the findings to your area of expertise to support a specific insight or use the data to highlight the relevance of your practical tips.

3. News and Current Events

Creating content inspired by news or recent events can help you capture the attention of a larger audience, join the conversation, and position your brand as relevant and current. You can monitor headlines and use Google Trends to identify topic ideas, then share your perspectives on current events as they’re related to your industry to raise your expert status.

This infographic from Statista illustrates how the 2020 election may pan out to capture the attention of a wide audience.

4. In-House Data

Annual reports, case studies, sales figures, etc., can be a treasure trove of business infographic ideas. You can use such first-party data to illustrate your expert insights, augment your market positioning and tell your unique brand story. Avoid navel-gazing by positioning the information so it’s helpful and relevant to your audience.

5. Upcoming Events

Keep an eye on upcoming events that are relevant to your industry and audience, such as major holidays and conferences, then identify opportunities around which you can create infographics. Besides the usual suspects, you can use Forekast — “the calendar of the internet” — to get infographic topic ideas. 

6. Existing Content

Work smarter, not harder: You don’t have to create everything from scratch. If you have been publishing content for a while, you probably have an archive full of blog posts, videos, press releases, case studies, and more. You can repackage them into infographics that tell the stories from a different angle. 

7. Survey Results

People like to know what celebrity, industry experts or others “just like them” think about a specific topic. You can conduct a survey and pair the results with a structured narrative to create an infographic that’s both informative and engaging. You also can use the opportunity to ask your audience’s opinion and gain insights into their preferences.

This interactive graph from Bicycling Magazine combines a poll with a bar chart to show what other readers think about a topic.

8. Academic Findings

Scientific data is intriguing but often rather dry to effectively engage an audience. You can leverage interesting facts from academic research and turn them into infographics to support your message. Google Scholar, which indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across a wide array of disciplines, is a great tool for finding studies on specific topics.

9. Expert Advice

Round-up posts are a content marketing staple and you can create infographics to take advantage of this content type. Gather input from industry experts on a specific topic and put the quotes in easy-to-digest and highly-shareable format. You can use the visual content as a standalone piece or to complement a round-up article.

This infographic from Visme summarizes expert opinions from a round-up post to make the content more shareable.

10. Company Culture

To humanize your brand, build trust with your audience and nurture customer relationships, you can create infographics that share the causes, hobbies or other tidbits about your employees. You also can tie the topic back to your company’s value, missions and offerings to augment your brand image.

This infographic from Column Five not only shares something about the company culture but mentions what the company does.

11. Company Story

Sharing your company’s history and origin story can help build trust and relationships with your audience while making your brand more approachable. You can turn the content on your website’s about page into a timeline and use a mix-chart infographic to share your organization’s accomplishments or explain a specific aspect of your business.

12. Checklists

Checklists allow you to summarize the content in a long blog post and turn it into a practical tool your audience can download and return to over and over again. You also can incorporate information about your product and services, if appropriate, as a resource to help the audience take action and achieve results.

This checklist from Spokester helps the audience perform a routine task.

13. How-To Guides and Instructions

Instead of a wall of instructional text, you can create a visual step-by-step guide that shares practical information and unique tips on how to perform a certain task. Encourage your audience to download or print out the infographic, which is a great way to increase your brand exposure and stay top of mind. 

This how-to infographic helps the audience understand the steps in a complex process and make them actionable.

14. Target Search Terms

Infographics are great for improving SEO and driving traffic, so why not create content around your target keywords to make them work harder for you? Review search terms that you’re targeting for your online ads and content marketing initiatives, then identify topics for which you can create infographics that’ll get ranked in search results.

15. Product Comparison

Audiences in the consideration and decision stage of the buyer’s journey would appreciate an at-a-glance infographic that can help them compare product features, pricing, etc. to make a purchasing decision. Besides comparing your products or services against your competition, you can feature those you offer as an affiliate or simply ones that your audience is interested in.

This infographic compares 2 services to help the audience make a choice.

16. Product Stats

A laundry list of features and benefits can be mind-numbing. Make it easy for your audience to learn about your products by creating an infographic that highlights their performance and aspects that are most relevant to your prospects. You can include testimonials and showcase results accomplished by other users as social proof.

17. Track Records and Accomplishments

From nonprofits seeking donors to startups looking for investors, sharing success or the positive effects of the cause can help increase the confidence that the audience has in your organization. Infographics allow you to sum up reports and make the statistics memorable so you can get the funding or support you need. 

This infographic helps a nonprofit raise funding by illustrating the benefits of the initiative that it’s supporting.

Support Your Content Ideas With Effective Infographics

Feeling inspired and ready to turn your ideas into impactful infographics? 

Here’s how to create effective visual content that’ll capture your audience’s attention and encourage them to engage with your information:

• Write a catchy headline that captures a viewer’s attention and clearly communicates the topic.
• Understand your audience’s preferences and interests, then position the information so it’s relevant to them.
• Don’t make your infographic too long or cluttered.
• Use white space generously to make the infographic inviting and easy-to-read.
• Keep text to a minimum and instead, use visual elements to communicate your message.
• Stick to a single topic to keep the content focused.
• Take the audience through a compelling narrative by telling a story with your data.
• Cite your sources and include the URLs in the infographic to give it credibility.
• Make sure that even all the text on the infographic is legible.
• Include your business name, logo and URL on the infographic to raise brand awareness and make it easy for people to find you.

There are many software applications for creating visual content, such as Piktochart, Venngage, Canva and Visme. They offer a variety of templates and easy-to-use drag-and-drop editors to help you create compelling infographics that can augment your content marketing strategy.

Speaking of content marketing, don’t forget to promote the infographics on your website, via email and on social media. Also, include a call-to-action that asks your followers to share the content and make it easy for them to do so by adding social share buttons to your website.

Infographics are a tried-and-true content format. By identifying the right topic idea and using an infographic type that supports your narrative, you can create high-quality visual content that captures attention and engages your ideal audience.