Marketing outreach comes in many forms, with one of the most useful being infographic outreach. It can get tiring reaching out to people and asking them to link back to your content. But as every marketer knows, building backlinks with infographics is a strategic form of online marketing. The more quality links you can build, the higher the rankings you can secure on search engine results pages.
Looking for a way to boost the effectiveness of your marketing outreach efforts? Make sure to read our guide on infographic outreach. Some teams have increased their email open rates from 10% to 80% by using infographics for marketing outreach purposes, and you can too! Keep reading to learn how to develop an effective infographic outreach strategy for your business.
What Is an Effective Infographic?
First and foremost, before you concern yourself with using infographics within your marketing outreach efforts, you must have the ability to create quality infographics and visual content. Don’t have the resources or know-how to create compelling infographics? You can always work from a template or outsource the infographic creation process to an infographic design agency. When you do the latter, you gain the advantage of having a team of expert copywriters and researchers who can gather credible data and information for your infographic. You’ll also have a team of graphic designers who take care of the entire design process.
An effective infographic that will improve your marketing outreach efforts will:
- Include relevant, credible data
- Have succinct text that complements impressive graphics and visuals
- Include optimized keywords
- List credible sources at the end
- Include an intriguing headline and introduction
- Have a compelling CTA at the end
- Consist of fonts and color schemes that complement one another
Using Infographics for Marketing Outreach
Effective marketing outreach starts with an infographic that has several parts within itself that can be pulled out separately and repurposed into long-form articles.
Take for example your company is a shoe store, and you create an infographic on the benefits of wearing steel toe boots. One part of the infographic focuses on wearing steel toe boots in a factory setting, another section highlights wearing the boots in an outdoor construction area, and then another that covers the comfort of wearing the steel toe boots. Each part of the infographic can be pulled out separately. This makes it possible to create a long-form article on each. This is an excellent example of how to get multiple uses out of a single infographic, all of which can boost the success of your marketing outreach efforts.
Imagine creating an email on each part of the infographic and using them as part of a drip-email campaign to your subscribers. Using our infographic example above, you have at least three emails you can create to drive traffic to your site. You also have three separate blog posts you can create and publish on your website. You can do this with all of your infographics as long as different parts of them can be used separately. Speak with an infographic design agency to learn more about creating infographics for multiple purposes.
Another way to use infographics for marketing outreach is to ask various sites to use them within their own content. You can use a site like SimilarSites to compile a list of sites that are relevant to the topic of your infographic. Yes, it’s going to take a few hours to compile this list and even longer to reach out to owners of the sites, but the effort is worth the results. Don’t be surprised if several of the sites agree to publish an article about your infographic and link back to your site in exchange for you doing the same for them. It’s a two-way street here.
Top Tips for Effective Infographic Outreach
The goal of infographic outreach is to generate buzz around your infographic. In doing so, you push your brand in front of a broader audience. As you likely already know, reaching out to hundreds of sites is often a dead end road. Out of 100, you may land 10 to 15 sites that are willing to build a backlink to your infographic; this is why creating a solid infographic outreach strategy is so important.
Get the Infographic Ready to Go Viral
A key to successful infographic outreach is to make sure the infographic is viral-ready, which involves ensuring it is highly shareable.
First, the landing page the infographic is published on needs to have a CTA positioned near social sharing buttons. Within the CTA, ask your audience to share the infographic. Important to note is that research confirms content that gets shared the most is published on pages that have multiple social sharing options. The more options you give the reader, the more likely they are to share; this means that in addition to being able to share across a variety of social media platforms, you also need to give people more than one way to share. You can put social sharing buttons at the bottom of the infographic as well as to the side of the page for your target audience.
Also helpful is to make sure the alt tags for the infographic are appropriate for each social media platform. You can go into your site’s settings and create different optimized alt tags for the infographic based on the social media platforms you’re sharing on. Optimizing your alt tags is extremely important for ensuring the infographic reaches the largest audience possible.
Use Your Buyer Persona
Your buyer persona is at the heart of all of your marketing efforts, and this especially rings true for infographic outreach. By having a clear understanding of you who are targeting with the infographic, it becomes much easier to reach them.
The buyer persona should clearly outline which social media platforms your most ideal audience uses the most; these are the platforms you want to focus on during content marketing outreach.
Create a Press Release
Try as you may, even the most awesome infographics rarely make it big unless they have a ton of press surrounding them. It’s the same as many talented individuals who never become famous. You can have an amazing voice or excellent acting talents, but unless you have a manager or agent who pushes your name in front of the right big-wig, you’re never going to make it in Hollywood.
For infographics, you need an agent, or even better a team of professionals, who focus solely on promoting them. This team can build a press release and optimize it for SEO and then submit it for publication through a variety of press release sites.
Press releases have numerous benefits. They are known to drive traffic and improve keyword rankings. They also do a great job at building inbound links to your site. It is imperative to optimize your press releases for SEO; this ensures they stand out among the thousands of other press releases that get published every day.
Other tips to follow when creating a press release for infographic SEO and outreach purposes include:
- Create a compelling lead: The lead in a press release is the opening sentence. It has to be compelling enough to grasp the attention of the audience. When crafted carefully and effectively, the lead will persuade the audience to keep reading. One of the best ways to create a compelling lead is to build multiple versions and test them out on different people.
- Use a unique approach: Steer clear of standard press release formats. You want yours to look like a press release, but it must be different from the millions of others already published. Don’t be afraid to be creative. Use lots of colors and even throw in an image.
- Outline the problem: The press release must clearly outline a problem. You don’t necessarily have to describe the solution to the problem, but you must make it clear that the infographic provides an effective solution; this is what draws the audience in and gets them to click through to the infographic. More importantly, this is how you increase traffic to your site, generate leads, and boost conversions.
- Check it for relevancy: The headline and keywords used in the press release must be relevant to what the audience expects to learn in regards to searching those keywords.
Publish a Social Media Release
In addition to a press release that you submit to various press release sites, you can also publish a social media release.
You can use the same press release you created for publishing through press release sites, but you must optimize it for the social media sites you are publishing it on. The headline should be extremely brief and rich in keywords. The sub-headline should be relevant to the message in the press release and is a great spot to include additional information to grab the audience’s attention. You’ll also have room to add a small overview of the infographic; this is another part that should be rich in relevant keywords.
In the body of the social media press release, you’ll include the story behind the infographic, including why you created it and why you think the audience will like it. Be sure to add a couple of facts from the infographic in the body of the press release. You can also include bullets to make the press release easier to read. At the end, add an About section that gives a preface of your company. Lastly, include multimedia links that are relevant to the infographic.
Next, create a social media sharing strategy. Start by sharing the social media press release. Your infographic must be shared via a blog post on your website before you start promoting it on social media; this ensures when people click-through, the infographic is up and ready to view.
It is of extreme importance that the infographic has an embeddable link; this makes it easy for your audience to share the infographic on their sites and to link back to it. More importantly, it improves your ability to build premium backlinks with the infographic.
You can use social media tools to schedule posts and tweets. Each new post should contain a specific fact about the infographic. Ideally, you’ll schedule a new post for each day for at least two weeks. Social media platforms to promote the infographic on include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Flickr. You can also submit the infographic to various infographic directories; this will help build backlinks for the infographic.
Repurpose the Infographic
Last on our list of creating an effective infographic outreach strategy is to repurpose the infographic in as many ways as possible. Use analytics to determine which parts of the infographic will garner the most engagement.
Take for example your analytics confirm that the majority of comments relating to your steel toe infographic are about wearing the boots in a factory setting. In knowing this, you can move forward by creating additional blog posts on the topic as well as video content. Within your new content creation, you can embed the infographic.
Focusing on the parts of the infographic that are garnering the most engagement is the best way to get the most out of your marketing outreach efforts.
Contact IGW Today!
You need an infographic design agency in your corner to help you build a solid infographic outreach strategy. Contact IGW today to learn more about the benefits of infographic services. We can also help you with all of your video marketing content needs.
