You Ask, I Answer: Infographic Tactics in 2022?

In this episode, Anne asks, candy corn, yes or no? No. They look like teeth and they taste like wax. Next question. Adrian asks, I've seen some good examples of data and the use of infographics in public relations and social media.

Is this still a valid tactic in 2022? Yeah. Um well here's the thing about tactics. Tactics always work. It's how well they're executed that matters.

It's how good you are at them, right? It's like, is frying still a valid method of cooking in 2022? Yes, of course it is. Unless you're an idiot and you stick your hand in the fryer, then no, you should under no circumstances be frying anything. Um infographics are just a tactic.

They're a method of condensing and distributing data. And so if you're good at it, if you're good at putting together something that tells a good story, that is appealing to look at, that is uh helpful and useful and valuable, it will absolutely work. The reason for your question is because there's a whole bunch of people out there, particularly in the public relations field, who are really bad at infographics. They create infographics that are just confusing to look at. They don't say anything, or if they do say something, it's blatantly self-serving.

Um the data, the underlying data is invalid. Um this has been especially a problem with surveys. I can't tell you the number of times that I have talked to a public relations person about survey data. And had to explain basic mathematics. Like, no, you can't add up certain percentages.

You you uh you just can't do that. Um, we have seen over the last 10 years in particular, last really last five years, but especially last 10 years, um, infographics went from something novel as a format to something pretty trite. But that doesn't mean they don't work. It just means that you have to be better at them than you have in the past. You have to be really creative.

You have to partner with good designers, right? People who are visual communicators. If you if that's not you, you have to partner with really good designers to distill down and tell the kind of story you want with dating. You have to, you've got to have good data, right? If the data you're putting together in an infographic makes no sense or is too hard to understand, which is something I'm guilty of a lot, then it doesn't land.

People look at it and they don't understand it. One of my favorite infographics of all time that I did um was mapping the size of social networks to the kingdoms of Westeros and Game of Thrones. Like, here's how large this social network is, this social network is. It was so so much fun. We actually made like a wall painting of it.

That was pretty easy to understand. People could look at that and understand oh, this is that's how big, you know, Facebook really is, or how big WhatsApp really is. It's the size of, you know, whatever the Lannisters controlled. Um so it's just a question of of developing those storytelling skills with data that makes it a working tactic. And again, there's a lot of there's a lot of garbage.

There's a lot of mediocre stuff too. One of the things that we don't talk about enough in content marketing is your content's got to add value somehow. One of the things that is in Google's webmaster guidelines, the search quality rating reader guidelines that I thought was really insightful was the middle score, which is pretty much guaranteed to not have you show up well in search. There's this expression they wrote says, nothing wrong but nothing special. When you look at an infographic that isn't done well, you look at it and go, okay, nothing wrong but nothing special.

And that's, I think, is the worst. I think that I I think that's even that that is even worse than a bad infographic because a bad infographic, it's like you know, a bad movie. After a certain point, it's funny, right? After a certain point, it's like, wow, that's so bad that it's actually good. But when you get into the the territory of the mediocre that just doesn't stand out, that doesn't do anything, you're like, wow, I your eyes just sort of slide off into the next thing.

And that's really dangerous. That is really dangerous to your content marketing. Because again, if people notice something, good or bad, you've gotten their attention for at least for a little while. But if you put something out that is bland, that is unremarkable, you're not gonna get any action on it. No heat whatsoever.

You won't get critics, you won't get fans, you just get nothing. Take a look at the feedback you get about your marketing now in your customer service inbox, in your email inbox, in your newsletter inbox, in your social media inboxes. What feedback are you getting? Are you getting people like, yeah, I really enjoyed that piece? Yeah, well, that was good, or that was really wrong.

I don't I didn't like that. I think you're wrong about that thing. Or are you getting nothing? Nothing but crickets. If you're not getting feedback, good or bad, your your content marketing has fallen flat.

And an infographic will not help that. It will not fix that because whatever is fundamentally wrong with your marketing is going to spread to every tactic that you try, right? If you are working with bad ingredients, it doesn't matter whether you fry, bake, or boil, it's still bad ingredients. So infographics absolutely still work in 2022 if you're good at them. Just like email still works, just like direct pay postal mail still works if you're good at it in 2022.

The challenge is you've got to be good at it. And that is the mountain we all have to climb. Thanks for asking. No more candy corn. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.