How does an infographic help UK marketers working in content writing services? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using infographics instead of regular media like text, pictures and video?
The Advantages of Different Types of Media
All media have advantages and disadvantages over the others. Text can contain the most precise information and is easy to produce, however on its own it can look dull and lifeless, and not very inviting when competing against the millions of other pieces of content produced in the UK that people could be looking at, even if written by skilled content writing services.
It’s a common phrase that a picture tells a thousand words, however which words it says exactly can be interpreted differently by different viewers. Marketers wish to have control over exactly what message they are portraying and it isn’t easy to do this with just a picture.
Video has the advantage of displaying pictures along with audio which performs the function of text, meaning a message can be communicated, but in an even easier form to absorb. However the disadvantage of video is the time taken to consume it. It is much easier to just glance at a photo and understand the message, or select the information you are interested in from a picture; with a video you are forced to invest time in watching everything until you see what you were interested in.
Infographics
Infographics combine the visual stimulation of a picture, with the precise information of a piece of text. In this sense it does a lot of what a video does, only the user only needs to engage with the parts of the infographic they are interested in.
Infographics can sometimes suffer from information overload, and it is also likely that unlike text or video which is read or viewed in a linear form from start to end, a viewer may pick and choose different pieces of information from an infographic.
Text Links
Text links are an important part of SEO and content writing services strive to send users to sites. It is more difficult to insert these links into inforgraphics, but that does not make them useless. Most infograms are presented in the body of an article anyway. This gives you plenty of opportunity to hit your keywords in the text introducing and explaining the inforgraphic, and perhaps the text that precedes and summarises it too.
Presenting data
An infographc is especially useful when wanting to present data. Numbers in text are boring, and it takes a skilled writer to communicate effectively what the numbers mean. By graphically representing them in an inforgraphic, the process of absorbing the information is much faster and appealing.
Market research indicated that text in the caption of an image was 300% more likely to be read than the text in the body of an article. Placing the text within the image in the form of an inforgraphic makes that text even more prominent. Images are twice as likely to be ‘liked’ on Facebook as text or links.
Using infographics is a very good solution for content writing services as it makes content and difficult-to-communicate data more visually engaging for UK and worldwide audiences; the end goal of content marketing is engagement.