Get the Most Out of Infographics – 3 Ways to Leverage Data Visualizations

By Donna de Leo, ETMG Designer and Art Director

You’ve spent time and energy to create awesome infographics. Now, how can you harness all that effort to maximize your brand exposure? Let’s explore three ways you can repurpose those data visualizations on other channels to connect with an even larger audience.

To stretch your marketing dollars, we’ll focus on owned media as opposed to paid or earned. Owned media is media controlled by your brand such as your website, Twitter account, YouTube channel, blog… you get the idea. It’s through these channels that you can start or extend the conversation.

So, here just a few ways to leverage your infographic design:

1. Create Social Cards or Memes

Deconstruct sections of your infographic to create social cards or memes. These are typically images, nuggets of text or more often both combined and shared across social media platforms with the potential to go viral.

Twitter has four types of social cards to choose from based on your content. Twitter social cards allow you to go beyond the 140-character limit of the platform and attach media experiences—including video—to Tweets. In a text-heavy stream your Tweets will stand out. The Tweet at right from National Geographic showcases one of the card types available.

2. Construct a PowerPoint Presentation or eBook

Organize your infographic into a PowerPoint presentation or eBook. Remember you already have the content and design elements, so you should be able to do this without much heavy lifting. If your infographic contains numerous sections, you probably have the page break out too. It’s now a matter of reformatting these components to accommodate a different size. If necessary, prudently add in additional supporting content.

To distribute, consider uploading your PowerPoint to SlideShare. Owned by LinkedIn, SlideShare, is a massively popular slide-hosting network with over 60 million users.¹ Bonus: SlideShare is low cost, there is both a free account option and the option to go pro.

Additionally, eBooks can simply be formatted as interactive PDFs. You now have another marketing tool that can be given to potential prospects signing up for your blog, attending a company webinar, or as part of an overall marketing campaign. ETMG also covers more on Interactive PDFs here.

3. Animate a Video

Animated videos are in high demand these days and extremely captivating. The production process is a little more involved but needn’t be complicated. This article goes a good job of breaking down the five steps.

Step one: you’ll want to write a short script based on your content. You can hire an animation professional or even use basic business tools like PowerPoint or Keynote—along with a desktop screen-recording tool—to create your animation.

To distribute, take advantage of the massive popularity of YouTube. Believe it or not, branded YouTube channels are free. Remember to cross-promote on your website and blog.

To sum up, take advantage of this digital age. Look at something and think what else it might be. As in life, experiment and observe what works best…then refine the next go around.