A lot of brands and businesses create and distribute great content, but no one notices them because one crucial aspect is often overlooked — the medium. Imagine making the best skin moisturizer in the world yet no one really knows about it because your packaging looks plain, dull, and passé. Sure, you can never judge a book by its cover alone, but your goal is to get your audience’s attention and make that first impression count.
Now, if you can totally relate to this, you’re probably asking – what medium am I missing?
Should you start publishing more blog posts? Or hire a videographer? How about an animator?
Before you go further down the rabbit hole of content medium, have you ever considered infographics for your business?
There’s a misconception that infographics are all about aesthetics and businesses should stay away from them because they look unprofessional.
In reality, infographics are more than just pretty fonts and colorful icons. Thoughtful and effective infographic design helps your audience understand complex information by organizing and simplifying them in ways that they can quickly grasp.
Why use infographics for your business
For a start, creating infographics have been shown to play an essential role in boosting lead generation efforts and helping your business stand out from the competition.
Next, it takes less time to create an infographic than a video or a long-form blog post. You can either hire a professional team to make your ideas come to life or make infographics in minutes using a template.
Finally, supplementing texts with visuals helps your audience retain information longer, share content quickly, and engage with supposedly boring content like reports, case studies, and manuals.
Scroll down below to discover how you can choose the best infographic template to use for your business, whether you’re launching a new product or would love to explain how your service works.
1. Understand the different types of business infographics
The first step in choosing an infographic template is knowing what your options are. There are roughly ten types of infographics and the following types are frequently used in business and marketing:
Maps
Use map infographics for your business if you want to showcase data trends based on location. This infographic format is ideal for presenting location-based information during business meetings or annual reports.
Versus or comparison infographic
Would you like to compare two objects, ideas, or concepts to your customers? Or prove how one option is superior/inferior to the other? A comparison infographic gets the job done!
The infographic below is an excellent example for produce stores who want to educate their prospects and customers about their offerings.
Timeline infographic
If you’re planning to show how something has changed over time or highlight how one thing leads to another, use a timeline infographic.
Likewise, use this infographic format in your business if you want to make a long, complicated story easier to understand (like how you ended up as the best skin care company today) or show how one thing leads to another (such as how your skin care ingredients have evolved since you started out).
List infographic
Your business will benefit the most from list infographic formats if you want to support a specific claim, argument, or fact. In some cases, a list infographic can also showcase steps that make up a process or cite examples just like the infographic below.
Flowchart infographic
This type of business infographic is best used to provide personalized answers for readers or demonstrate how multiple situations can reach the same or different conclusions.
Informational infographic
An informational infographic type for your business helps cut down on text and makes a plain article more interesting. It also increases your content’s sharing potential.
Data visualization
If you want to make data-driven arguments easier to understand or ensure facts and statistics are more memorable, adding data visualization components like charts and graphs in your infographic is a good option.
Process or How-to infographic
A process or how-to infographic format is fitting for businesses and marketers who want to explain a complex concept, idea, or procedure into memorable, easy-to-understand chunks of information.
2. Focus on your industry and audience
Now that you know the different types of infographics, your next step is to figure out which content format is frequently used and shared in your industry. Here’s a great guide to content trends resource by ClearVoice.
Have you noticed how some of these industries prefer a list-style infographic or visual article?
Afterward, you can:
- Pick a template that reflects the level of professionalism in your industry. For example, a high-level financial advisor might use a more “straightforward” infographic than a lifestyle blogger. See a few industry examples on our Pinterest page.
- Choose template styles acknowledging your audience’s tastes. If your audience is used to sharing dense, information-packed content, choose a template that can hold a lot of information. If your audience prefers bite-sized content, choose a template with more white space.
3. Ensure that your template matches your message or idea
Once you know the style of infographic to choose (professional or casual, technical or minimalist), it’s time to customize a template that does your story or message justice.
First off, make sure that any template you use is organized in a way that makes putting your information into it easy. We recommend using the infographic structure below:
Of course, you can use circles, arrows, or a unique template that doesn’t follow this pattern exactly. Just make sure that it isn’t too confusing and follows a logical thought process.
Ready to make your own business infographics?
Finally, if you find a template that seems like it’s got great potential, ask yourself:
- Can I easily share my information with this template?
- Do I have to change a lot?
- Does it already flow logically or will I have to move things around?
The idea is to make this as easy on yourself when choosing a template. Don’t choose a template that doesn’t work for you at all.
Before you start editing and customizing the business infographic template of your choice, here’s a quick tutorial video on how to customize infographic templates in Easelly:
If designing from an infographic template seems impossible and you have other important things to do for your brand or business, hire our infographic design service team instead.
*Editor’s Note: This blog post was rewritten and updated on July 3, 2019 for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was originally written and published on December 1, 2017.