Military Marketing: Infographics

David Yoo, RallyPoint Civilian Careers.

Infographics are generally long, informative, and sometimes vertical graphics that include details such as charts, graphs, statistics, diagrams, and other types of visual information, such as the one presented above by RallyPoint. The power of an infographic lies with its ability to present lots of information in a visually appealing way so that the reader wants to read the content you've written. Again, having readers want to consume the content you've created is akin to saying that your content is valuable, the most important aspect about content marketing.  

There are many outside resources you can reach out to if you don't think you have the time to spend on creating your own infographics for your company. Sites such as infogr.am or visual.ly can create professionally designed infographics for you in exchange for a fee. 

But why infographics?

1. People Like Visuals

As the Content Marketing Institute revealed earlier in 2013, 

"Visual content is at an all-time high: Social media sites that focus exclusively on images are swiftly gaining in popularity. In February, TechCrunch reported that the percentage of online adults using Pinterest (15 percent) had almost caught up to the percentage using Twitter (16 percent). Facebook recognized that Instagram was going places when they purchased the photo-focused app for $1 billion in 2012. Today, Instagram has 150 million monthly active users. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all get the power of the picture and have added better image-sharing functionality to their platforms over the past few years."

We live in an age where information is fed to us in a non-stop manner - it's no wonder why many call our current period the "information generation." According to Richard Alleyne we receive 5x as much information as we did in 1986, or as much as about 174 newspapers a day. 

A study by the International Journal of Communication also revealed that Americans consume about 1.3 trillion hours of information outside of work, an average of almost 12 hours per person per day, with media consumption totaling 3.6 zettabytes and 1,080 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for the average person on an average day. That is a lot of information occupying a person's mind on a daily basis. 

So how, in a world where the average person is bombarded with massive amounts of information daily, can a business attract a potential consumer and his willingness to read the content that you're creating?

In a word, color.

Researchers have found that color increases readers’ attention spans and recall by 82% and helps gain readership by 80%. What better way to increase the memorability of your content by including some infographic material embedded on your blog post? Not only will readers be more inclined to click on your post in the first place, but they are also a lot more likely to finish reading the material because they have been captivated by the material.

2. People Remember Your Company

Infographics are generally designed to include information that the organization that created them wants its readers to understand. Logos, website addresses and domains, email addresses, phone numbers, contact information. 

An infographic created and posted by RallyPoint regarding homeless veterans

Infographics can leverage readers' attention by showing the viewers what type of content matters to the company and why it is spending time to create visually appealing images to attract people's interest. Usually, many details and the company's brand can be found in an infographic created by the business. The first infographic presented at the top and the infographic below demonstrate how a company's brand is an invariable part of the information that the company is trying to present.  

3. More People Will Read Your Material

Earlier in this post, we mentioned that not only will readers be more inclined to click on your content, but that they would also be more likely to finish reading the material. We bring this up as a separate point because this is important within the context of gaining visibility through search engines. 

With more individuals reading your post and traffic to your blog posts increasing because readers find your content genuinely enjoyable to read and are interested in finding out more, the chances of having your content go viral are higher.

Check out some of the infographics that went viral on social media outlets, such as this infographic detailing the health risks associated with sitting down for long periods of time (created by MBC, a medical billing and coding organization).

Viral content means more inbound links (i.e. more companies, blogs, and online writers to direct their readership to yours for similar content), which means your website comes up higher on the search engine results. You can build an even more robust infographic/blog campaign by incorporating the keywords that you would like to hit in terms of attracting a target audience as part of your post's title. 

All this contributes to you scoring a higher rank on popular search engines, allowing you greater access to those who are interested in the types of content and products you create as well as the services that you offer. this better even more by adding highly targeted keywords as part of the title, description and meta information of your Infographic. 

This can give your Infographic higher chances of appearing as a relevant image or resource in search results. This can go really well for your business as up to 60% of consumers will have the most probability of contacting your business if they see your images, in this case an Infographic, as a relevant source for their needs.

See the Difference Yourself

Get some content and start planning the type of information you'd like to present in your infographic. Want to try your hand at creating your own infographic?

Piktochart is free for casual users (the site also offers premium upgrades starting at $29/month). The service offers an incredibly user-friendly dashboard where you can fiddle with basic, intermediate, and advanced templates in order to visually tailor your narrative however you want. 

You can manipulate the fonts and images and create designs that you would want into something that tells your story. You can change fonts, insert or move images, and do just about everything you can do with other softwares for free. 

Upgrading it will allow you to "save into a search-engine optimized friendly HTML version (almost released) and to remove the watermark that comes on the free level." It may well be worth a shot, and if you have the budget but not the time to invest in creating your own infographics, you can always find online services that will create one for you. 

If you're interested in seeing more of RallyPoint's infographics, check them out here.

For more information about creating valuable content for marketing to general audiences as well as for specific military audiences, check out some of previous blog posts about content marketing. Check out some of RallyPoint's unique Business Services here and have access to more than 740,000 members of the military and former military on our social network.