Imagine putting in so much effort into creating an attractive infographic – and not have anyone see it. Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?
A successful content marketing strategy begins with choosing the right topic. If you choose a topic no one cares about, there’s no way your infographic is going to get views and shares.
Coming up with creative infographic ideas is slightly more complex than ideas for blog posts or even eBooks for that matter. That’s because you can’t just design an infographic on any topic and expect it to fly.
Infographics work best for the following scenarios:
- Providing an overview of a concept
- Presenting qualitative data and survey results
- Explaining a complex topic
- Comparing options or showing how they’re related
- Defining the steps in a process
There are different types of infographics to accurately present each of these scenarios.
Now, comes the big question – what should your infographic be about?
Regardless of whether you’re creating an infographic to raise brand awareness or educate your audience, you need to present information that’s relevant to your audience, comprehensive and valuable.
Here are five ways to come up with creative infographic ideas.
Survey your audience
The best way to understand what your audience wants is to ask them.
Start with creating a survey and asking your audience specific questions. You can send them the survey link over email and also post in on your social media platforms.
Make sure you ask a mix of open-ended and close-ended questions so it’s easier for you to track responses and analyze the results. You can then create an infographic to present the survey results.
Here’s a snippet from one of the infographics we at Venngage created after speaking to over 200 marketers on how they used visual content in 2019.
Source: Venngage
Alternatively, you can also send a survey to your customers asking them what their pain points, challenges, and needs are. On the basis of their response, you can create an informative infographic that can be used to present solutions to their specific challenges.
Brainstorming exercises
Conducting a productive brainstorming session is a great way to come up with creative infographic ideas. Remember – no idea is wrong. What’s important is letting your thoughts flow and making a note of every small idea that comes to mind.
So, get your entire team together and spend some quality time brainstorming.
Using mind map tools is an effective way to come up with spontaneous ideas and document them. You can decide on a central topic and jot down ideas related to it. Mind mapping helps visualize ideas and establish connections, resulting in a more productive brainstorming session.
Find trending topics
The world is a happening place. Why not find what’s trending and leverage topical content to create your next infographic?
This lets you piggyback on its popularity while using it to put your brand out there and drive traffic to your website.
You can use tools such as Google Trends and BuzzSumo to find relevant topics that are trending and create valuable content around it. It’s also a good idea to pick a trending topic and create an infographic to present your own unique angle or challenge the popular opinion.
For example, with the COVID-19 outbreak, we at Venngage decided to create several informative infographics surrounding the pandemic to share reliable information.
Source: Venngage
Do keyword research
The goal of every infographic is to generate traffic and in order to achieve that, you need to optimize it for SEO which begins with doing accurate keyword research.
The point of doing keyword research is to understand what people are commonly searching for and create content around those keywords.
You can use a tool such as Ahrefs. Enter the broad topic and you’ll be presented with a host of keywords, along with their search volume and keyword difficulty.
It’s also a good idea to look at the ‘Questions’ section to see the answers people want and take inspiration from there for your infographic content.
Repurpose popular posts
With all the time we spend creating new content pieces, we certainly don’t do justice when it comes to maximizing their potential. So, how about looking into your existing content? You might just find inspiration for your next content idea there.
Start with putting together well-performing content pieces. They can be blog posts, videos, presentation decks, or even a podcast episode.
While repurposing, make sure you’re able to visualize the information and present it in a manner that’s easy to consume. You can also add data to make it more concrete but focus on clearly conveying the message through the infographic.
Conclusion
Before you finalize a topic, ask yourself – why will my readers care about this infographic?
If you’re able to come up with a convincing answer, you’re on the right track.
Once you’ve narrowed down on a solid topic, you can use an infographic maker to create a well-designed and valuable infographic to boost your SEO campaign and drive traffic.
