Your clients live in a world where vast volumes of information are available 24 hours a day. This is a wonderful time to get connected to others online and to learn through websites that share information from around the world. It's also an overwhelming time: your clients are on information overload as they try to process all of the facts about their insurance questions. Where can they find the answers, and how can they understand them once they find the information that they're looking for? Sometimes, a simple picture can impact your clients much more than thousands of words of text. If you're developing inbound marketing content, use these infographic tips to improve your education and interactions with your clients.
How Can Infographics Help Your Insurance Marketing?
Infographics combine text and images. These visuals rely less on an individual's ability to quickly process written language, making your message easier for everyone to understand. Infographics have an impact, and they're simple to share on social media. They also give you entry into visually-oriented social sites such as Pinterest, where your message depends almost entirely on the image you've created. People don't even need to click through to understand your message: they can see it right there in their social media feed. This ease of sharing and clickability helps infographics drive traffic to your site.
Should You Use an Infographic?
Whether you're working on your latest insurance marketing plan or your newest ebook, when should you choose an infographic? To create a graphic that really helps your insurance marketing, you need to have compelling data behind it. Your message should be ideal for a visual format: if you can say it easily in words, you may not need an infographic, unless you're aiming for other benefits such as shareability. You also need to gauge how often you've used your visual medium recently. If your audience really reacts well to visuals and you haven't created one in a while, add an infographic to your diverse stream of blog content and social media posts.
What Information Should You Have on Your Infographic?
Your infographic is a graphic, but it also needs to contain information. You don't need to make every blog post into an infographic, but when you have the right information combined with the right visuals, magic happens. Ask these questions to determine what information you need on your infographic:
Consider your audience. What's one thing that they'd love to know?
What nugget of information do you have that would be best explained in a visual format?
What story are you trying to tell with your infographic? Add the information you need to explain it.
What is your focus area? Ask and answer a single, targeted question, provide one revelation to your readers, or explain a simple problem in your infographic.
Do you have credible data to back yourself up?
Visual Tips for Creating Your Infographic
Infographics are a hybrid of text and graphic design. They can have a huge impact and greatly improve mental processing of data. However, if they're poorly designed, an infographic can be a confusing turnoff. As you develop the graphic elements of your infographic, what should you consider?
Start with the basics: make sure that your infographic is shareable by limiting its size to 735 pixels wide and 5000 pixels tall.
Add some color, but not too much. The best infographics use a limited color palette. This isn't an art show: it's a way to convey information in a simple but engaging way. Use contrasting colors and highlight sparingly. Highlighting focuses the eye, so too much can be confusing.
Great infographics make the main message stand out using strong color and text. The message or question is front and center. Guide your reader from the most important to the least important information, so that if your readers only notice one thing, it's the key message in the infographic.
Tell a story with visual patterns. Repeat elements such as a similar shape or font to guide the reader's eye along the path you want that person to take. Connect visual elements together so that none of them are floating in space. If items are related to each other, place them close to each other so that the reader knows that they're the next part in the story.
Choose the right format to visualize your data. Ask colleagues or those unfamiliar with your data to see if they can instantly understand what your graph or pie chart is saying. If not, you may need to choose another way to portray it in a visual format.
The bottom line: an infographic should make it easier for your reader to understand the information. Focus on conveying information in a visual format to send a message, not to make a beautiful picture.
Graphic Design Help for Infographic Newbies
You sell insurance and you work with people, but you may not be strong in graphic design. This is a common barrier to creating great infographics. Luckily, you don't need to be proficient in design, because there are many sites that can provide you with design assistance in the form of pre-made, customizable templates for your infographics.
Are you looking for a site that will guide you through your baby steps creating infographics? Easel.ly is an excellent choice. It has pre-made templates that you can use to start off your infographic creation.
If you're looking for a way to display your data, Infogr.am mimics an Excel spreadsheet, making it easy to show correlations between data sets in a pleasant, visual way.
If you'd like a little more choice, Piktochart allows you to upload your own images, choose new fonts, and add different colors to your infographic.
For both templates and a huge variety of choice, visit Venngage, with infographics designed for a myriad of different uses including reports and social media posts.
When you're looking for networking and education opportunities in the insurance field, talk to the American Agents Alliance. As a national insurance association for independent insurance agents & brokers we're here to support agents like you as you grow your business. Contact us today and learn more about our membership benefits.
