By Elvire Gosnold, Director, Blabbermouth Marketing: Infographics are my topic of the month as I love their simplicity and how they lend themselves beautifully to the IT and telco industry.
They provide visual impact that can quickly and concisely explain the values of a more complicated solution. In an era when we are time poor and experience information overload, infographics draw our attention to the most important elements of a subject and can even encourage us to read in more depth.
Visual thinking is apparently the most common way we piece together information and considering most of us would have seen visual learning featuring heavily in our early years of education, it is not surprising that infographics are so popular. Because many of us think in pictures, it makes perfect sense that marketing and communications should leverage this comfort zone where readers become more susceptible to reading content they may have otherwise found too intimidating to read.
The colours and styles you can introduce to an infographic means that you can use it to literally brighten up text heavy collateral. Sales proposals and onboarding packs are just two examples of how infographics lend themselves well to more traditional collateral that may in the past have been quickly flicked through. It is also a way of highlighting your company's main achievements in a manner that your competitors may not be doing.
Before you start getting happy with ClipArt, make sure you cover a few basic rules. Ensure your visual interpretations encourage your viewer to read more, use simple imagery to complement a complex subject and include as much statistical data as you can, but ensure the message is broken down into easy to digest sections. Better still, use different images to offer both a broad overview and greater levels of detail.