Infographics have grown to become one of the most efficient and lucrative forms of inbound marketing, giving businesses a chance to show off their knowledge, create something pretty, and attract dozens (if not hundreds) of natural backlinks for SEO (search engine optimization) in a single go.
To someone new to the world of infographic marketing, the strategy may seem like a gimmick built around a buzzword, but the data doesn’t lie. People strongly prefer visual content, and marketing infographics take advantage of that opportunity.
However, infographic marketing isn’t as simple as creating a piece and posting on your website. If you want to get the best results for your infographic based and maximize your chances of making it go viral, you’ll need to put some work into it.
Creating a high-quality infographic is only half the battle. Without the right promotional strategy, even the most beautiful infographic can go unnoticed. To get maximum visibility and ROI from your work, you need a multi-channel promotion plan that includes organic, paid, and outreach-based tactics.
Below are 20+ proven ways to promote and market your infographic effectively.
Table of Contents
Why Infographic Marketing Is Important
Infographic marketing is valuable both as a short-term means of attracting visitors and as a long-term brand strategy:
- Infographics increase your brand authority. Your brand is your company’s identity, and infographics are the perfect way to promote that identity. You’ll have a chance to show off your branding and your personality in the wording and design of the infographic marketing, but your subject matter is what really counts. Depending on the depth of research you do, you can prove yourself as an industry leader and establish yourself as a major authority. It makes people trust you and value you more.
- They attract natural backlinks to your site for SEO. Search engine ranks are largely dependent on the quality and volume of backlinks pointing back to your site. However, if your links appear to be built unnaturally, you could face a penalty from Google. Infographics are beneficial because they naturally encourage people to share and re-post the digital material with website backlinks. You get all the links you could ever want, and you don’t have to worry about them appearing to be artificially built. Social sharing that goes viral is what you are after.
- They increase click-through opportunities for raw web traffic. Finally and perhaps most obviously, the presence of your infographic will entice people to click through to your website. That means a greater number of relevant visitors from around the web as your infographic circulates.
A Final Checklist for Infographic Marketing
Before you start syndicating your infographic, it’s a good idea to run through a final checklist of must-have qualities:
- Make sure your branding is visible and recognizable. Include a watermark if necessary to make sure the infographic’s topic can only be attributed to you.
- Double check your reference list. People want infographics they can trust, so make sure all your reference links are accurate and working properly.
- Create an embed code, or include a link to your site in the infographic itself. This will ensure that people can quickly and easily share your infographic with the accompanying link.
Infographics can be very effective ways to spread your message via multiple marketing channels.
They are eye-catching and often much more compelling than plain text. Here are 27 powerful methods for promoting your infographics.
1. Submit it to Free Infographic Directories
Just as there are article directories and video sharing sites, there are also infographic directories. Some of the generating leads ones are Cool Infographics, Infographic Directory, Daily Infographic and Visual.ly.
2. Make a Video From It
You can get more mileage from your infographics by turning them into videos from an infographic template. A simple way to do this is to separate the different parts of the infographic and make them into PowerPoint slides.
For added appeal, you can add music to it. You can also make this type of video using services such as Animoto.
3. Send it to Your Subscribers
If you have an email list, you should let them know whenever you publish a new infographic marketing. The easiest way to do this is usually to give them a link to your blog. Sending attachments or inserting the entire infographic in the email itself are also possible, but these tactics can lower your delivery and open rates.
4. Form Partnerships With Your Best Sources
When you include links in your infographics, you are helping to drive traffic to these sites. You can therefore contact these bloggers or webmasters and ask them to help promote your well designed infographic in return. They are, after all, helping themselves as well as you by doing this.
5. Tweet About It
While you can’t include the full infographic in a tweet, you can include teasers. Tweet certain key points and include a link to the full infographic on your site.
6. Send Out Press Releases
If you have an beautiful infographic that is filled with valuable visual content, you can promote it using press releases. A press release must be written as a news story rather than an advertisement, but you can still build links from the site where your infographic is published.
7. Share it on Pinterest
In addition to other social media sites, be sure to use Pinterest, which is an ideal platform for infographics. Since this fast growing site is image-oriented, infographics are very popular there. Be sure to create boards that attract the kind of more traffic you’re seeking. You can create infographics on as many boards as you want on Pinterest.
8. Optimize Your Infographics
Whenever you create a new infographic, be sure to optimize it the same way you would an article, blog post or video. This means using a variety of keywords, both primary and long tail. It’s always a good idea to do keyword research to come up with words and terms people are searching for that you might not have thought of.
9. Let People Embed Your Infographic
If you want your content marketing infographics to get shared and go viral, you should make it easy for people to embed it on their own sites. It’s not difficult to learn how to create an embed code for your infographic, and this can help you get it out to a wider target audience.
10. Include Portions of the Infographic on Facebook
Complete infographics often don’t look their best on Facebook, which is why it’s often better to publish teasers instead. This can also be a good way to get Facebook friends and fans to visit your website. As you’re creating your marketing infographic, keep in mind which segments might be especially appealing to readers on Facebook.
11. Repurpose the Text for Other Marketing Campaigns
The text portion of an infographic can be repurposed into blog post or social media posts, articles or documents on sites like Scribd, Docstoc or other social platforms.
When you do this, don’t forget to include a link to the complete infographic.
12. Translate Infographics Into Other Languages
This is an innovative way to generate traffic from completely new sources. Images are by nature universal, so you just have to translate the text. Be sure to get good translations, though, as otherwise your messages could be distorted or misunderstood. This can be a good way to get traffic from other parts of the world.
13. Publish it on Content Curation Sites
There are lots of visual content curation websites where you can publish infographics.
These can be a valuable source of traffic. Some of these include Bundlr, ScoopIt and Internet Billboards.
14. Have a Main Site For Your Infographics
If infographics are a major part of your marketing strategy, you should have one central place to publish them. This can be your WordPress blog, business website, Blogspot blog or anything that works for you. This way, no matter what promotional tactics you use, you can point traffic back to this central site. If your infographics are too spread out, it’s harder to promote them.
15. Encourage People to Share it
When you post your infographic on your blog, make sure you have share buttons for Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Don’t be afraid to ask people to share it if they like it.
Remember, the most shareable marketing infographics include visual data like graphs and pie charts.
16. Use Paid Ads or Facebook Sponsored Stories
If you are willing to invest a little money into promoting your next infographic, you can use Google or other search engines or Facebook ads for this purpose. Another useful tool is Facebook Sponsored Stories. To get the most out of these advertising platforms, it’s necessary to test and carefully track your results. Find out which headlines and ads bring you the most traffic.
17. Connect With Influencers
Influencers are the people in your niche or industry who have a large following and are considered experts. These are people who can help you connect with a wider intended audience. Reach out with them via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and on their blogs. Study what type of relevant content that they typically publish and pitch them about using your infographic.
18. Choose a Catchy Headline
As with other types of own content, people will usually notice a headline before anything else. That’s why it’s important to choose a title for your infographic that people will be attracted to. This will depend on your target keyword intended audience, of course. While you should be thinking in terms of keywords and SEO for headlines, you also have to make your headline compelling so that people will be drawn to the infographic.
19. Pitch it to Blogs (and Publish It On Your Own Blog)
Many people are familiar with guest blogging, where you seek targeted blogs to publish your articles. A similar tactic can be taken with marketing infographics. Make a list of active blogs in your industry and pitch them on using your infographic.
In addition, you should start by publishing the infographic as a dedicated blog post on your website. Include at least 300-500 words of optimized text explaining the key points, so it can rank in search engines.
20. Get Involved on Forums
Forums can be good places to connect with a targeted audience and get people interested in your content. The best approach is to not be too blatant about self-promotion and to rely on your signature for promoting. You can use your signature to drive traffic to the site or post where your infographic is located.
21. Pay Attention to Design Principles
Not all marketing infographics are equally popular. One key reason for this is that some of them are poorly designed. This can mean that there’s too much text, the wrong color scheme or a confusing layout. The best infographics are usually concise, not overly long without too much data. It should flow in a natural way, so the eye moves from Point A to Point B without getting distracted.
22. Use Google Alerts to Find Additional Places to Promote
Google or search engines Alerts can let you know when new content is published that is related to your infographic. You can then contact the publisher and let him or her know you have an infographic that might enhance their content marketing.
23. Promote Offline
There are ways to promote your infographic offline. You can post links on business cards, bulletin boards or in classifieds of local publications. For this purpose, it’s best to have a simple and short domain name that can easily be remembered.
24. Publish Images on Flickr and Instagram
Just as you can publish the text portion of your infographics as articles, you can publish the images to sites such as Flickr and Instagram. In this case, you should include the link to the complete infographic with each image.
25. Promote it on Answer Sites (e.g. Quora & Reddit)
If your infographic solves a problem or answers a question, you can promote it on sites like Yahoo! Answers and other answer sites. Search for active questions and you can use the link to your infographic in your answer.
Find questions related to your infographic’s topic and provide a helpful answer that includes a link to your marketing infographic.
26. Tie in Your Infographic With Seasonal Events and Holidays
You can make your infographics more relevant by connecting them with events or holidays that people are thinking about. This may take some creativity, but you may be able to alter an existing infographic and tie it in with a certain holiday, sporting event, news story or pop culture reference.
27. Link to it in E-books
You can link to infographics from e-books. These can be free e-books that you use to build your mailing list or perhaps an e-book you publish on Kindle. Most e-book platforms, including Kindle, support live links.
Conclusion
An infographic is one of the most powerful content assets you can create — but only if people actually see it.
By using a diversified promotion strategy across multiple channels, you dramatically increase the chances of your infographic getting shared, linked to, and cited.
When it comes to effective infographic marketing, don’t rely on a single tactic or hope for virality; instead, build a repeatable system that leverages SEO (search engine optimization), social media, email, outreach, and repurposing to maximize exposure and ultimately drive more website traffic from referrals and search engines.
The more effort you put into promotion, the more long-term value your infographic will deliver in terms of traffic, authority, and brand visibility.
Consistency beats virality when marketing infographics.
While you may hope your infographic goes viral, a consistent, multi-channel promotion strategy will ensure your content gets maximum reach and longevity.
Want more information on existing content marketing? Head over to our comprehensive guide on content marketing here: The All-in-One Guide to Planning and Launching a Content Marketing Strategy.
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
