With content marketing increasingly in evidence, it’s common sense to think of a better way to organize the information in an easily way as well as attractive and relevant, so the readers can understand it. Here comes an important ally in this mission: the infographic. But do you know the meaning of this term?

Understanding what is an infographic

According to Wikipedia, infographic is a graphical visual representation in order to facilitate understanding of certain content. It’s generally characterized by the addition of short texts with figurative and schematic representations.

The text that expresses the editorial line of Grupo Folha, a Brazilian newspaper, also highlights the importance of this resource to point out the infographics shall cause an easy, quick and clear view by the reader. “Everything must be explained, clarified and detailed - in a concise and accurate manner, in a language both colloquial and direct as possible. (...) In fact, all you can be told in the form of a square, map, graph or table should not be told in the form of text”.

In a few words, infographic is the junction of the words info (information) and graphical (visual representation). The feature contains a set of graphics serving as a support for text. With instructive and didactic content, it’s widely found in technical, educational or scientific manuals. The appeal, however, begins to gain strength in email marketing campaigns.

An strong ally for email marketing

If you have a long text and an infographic, both about the same subject, to which one you would devote most attention? Certainly, the graphics are more attractive at first glance. In addition, through them, the same message can be transmitted in an objective, dynamic and easy way to understand. The feature gets more notoriety in a society that prioritizes fast consumption of information within its rush daily life.

Although it started historically by manual and evolved to complement the content of newspapers and magazines, the degree of acceptance was so great that it didn’t take too long to invade the web platforms, favored by the vertical reading, the visual impact and the speed with which the information were understood.

Used to untangle concepts, infographics require some preparation at the creation time:

• Planning: think, rate and sketch on paper all the ideas for the visual and textual parts;
• Domain: with the content (text and image) already defined, study the theme that will be explored;
• Synthesis capacity: transform text into images and prepare short sentences to follow them;
• Organization: distribute information while keeping an hierarchy of the content to facilitate the reader\'s understanding;
• Aesthetic sense: keep all elements well distributed and arranged in harmony (colors, fonts).

Allied to these principles, it’s worth mentioning the teamwork between the writer or copywriter and the designer. This set applied to email marketing makes content even more dynamic, qualified and susceptible to shares.

Analyzing these five points highlighted above, it’s important to note that before starting to create an infographic you must, in addition to master very well the subject that will be lectured, know your target audience deeply. With these two well-defined items, it\'s time to organize the information.

Set the basic structure of your infographic, starting with the choice of main content, secondary themes and how will be the relationship between them. The next step is the font. Choose simple fonts for easy reading with a maximum of two different styles and three different sizes, maintaining the minimum of 12pt.

With the text blocks already prepared, create a color scheme consistent to each subject and design a reading line. Let highlighted what is more important, following the logic based on the form. If circular, place the text in the center. If the content enters horizontally, give preference to the upper corner at left to start it and to the bottom corner at right to end it.

Bet in icons to assist the synthesis of more complex concepts, together with graphs easily assimilated.

Get to know the types of infographics and choose the right one for your campaign

With the line thought aligned to the content and to the design that will be applied at the infographic you prepare to follow your email marketing campaign, there is only one more thing left. You should decide on the best type to represent the theme you have chosen.

The pros and cons of applying infographics

In this post, we showed what an infographic is, the different types of approach and how it can give more appealing tone to your email marketing campaign. To finish the theme, we present now the pros and cons of this feature.

Pros

• It serves as a complement which enriches how to present content, directly impacting on content marketing;
• It has a more appealing and friendly tone to stimulate the sharing statistics and increase engagement;
• It facilitates the understanding of the information and it strengthens the maintenance of the relationship between brand and customer;
• It increases your business communication and marketing strategy;
• Statistics gain “life” and are open to an easy interpretation;
• It attracts the reader\'s attention for a quick and easy understanding.

Cons

• It requires some experience in graphic design, since all content is surrounded by an artistic process;
• It demands some concept of colors combination, font sizes, style and images.

If you are not a professional design or doesn’t have a creative team, the web provides some free online tools to create infographics. One is the Easel.ly, offering some ready-made and intuitive templates for you to customize as you wish. Another option is the Piktochart. There you can set the format before you begin: infographic, report, banner or presentation. And there is no need to worry about saving the file all the time, the process is automatic. You also have Venngage, with the same options from others, except for the download option, released only for premium accounts, but the file can be shared on social networks. And to finish the list, our last tip is the infogr.am, more focused on graphics. You can upload the data from your computer and customize it, add videos, pictures and links as a complement. The difference here is that you can add people to create a team to work on infographics.

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