Content marketing is crucial to your success as a realtor or any small business. Creating infographics can take that marketing to the next level. Whether you are a seasoned business owner or brand new to your industry, you are always looking for something new and fresh that makes you stand out from the crowd. When used effectively, infographics give you more visibility and drive traffic to your website.
Research shows that our attention span is about seven seconds when reading text. That’s not much time to get your message across. You’ve either gotten their attention or they’re moving on to another read. Adding infographics makes it more likely whoever is reading will keep reading because they’re curious and want more. But what exactly is an infographic and how can you use it in your marketing?
What Infographics Are
Information or data that is visually represented is an infographic. This includes using color, charts, images, and graphs. Often, the information you want to convey has to be understood by the average person. If the reader is familiar with real estate, that’s fine. But what about a brand new buyer? Or seller? You want them to understand what you offer and how they need you as their realtor. When done correctly, infographics take complex information and put it in a visual format that makes it much easier to understand and remember. Research has shown we remember 10% of the information we hear, but a whopping 65% when text is presented with a visual.
Remember Cliff Notes when you were in school? Those small books that gave you a chapter by chapter synopsis of a novel? Instead of reading the assigned book, you bought this to make sure you got the most important information to answer the teacher. Infographics are like Cliff Notes. They give us the crucial information we need in a way that stands out. All of the extra “stuff” is taken out. The content is easier to understand and retain. Key points can be made without the reader losing interest.
Compelling Statistics on Creating Infographics
Remember that seven-second attention span? When color is used in visuals, studies have shown an 82% increase in a reader’s attention span. Color even makes information easier to remember! Text in black and white is not as memorable as text in color. When we process visual information, we’re using 50% of our brain power. It’s easy to see just how important adding infographics to your marketing strategy has become.
Ways to Create Infographics
Creating infographics are a great way to attract more viewers and drive traffic to your website.
You can create videos, use data as a quote, even create a pictogram that gives the same text in a more visually pleasing format.
- Videos – Videos reign on social media. It doesn’t matter if you post on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest; videos capture your attention. Presenting a short infographic on social media is unique and easily understood.
- Quote – Create an image with a statistic that jumps out to the reader. Make the data (i.e 68%) more prominent than the text. You look through your content to see the statistics that you know will catch your reader’s eye. You can even put the text on an image and the reader clicks on it to learn more!
- Pictogram – This is using icons to show the data. Icons can be placed side by side to make comparisons.
How infographics can be used
Let’s face it – statistics and data are boring to most people. Quite frankly, they can be confusing and difficult to understand. But statistics are also essential to any business. Statistics tell you how you’re doing, what’s working/what’s not working, etc. Here are some effective ways infographics take those dull, hard to understand statistics and make them “user friendly”:
- Keep it simple – Key information gets to your target audience without all the other stuff. You want potential clients to know who you are. Think logos – you remember brands by the visual image shown.
- Relay important trends – The real estate market is all about trends. Graphs are a great way to show comparisons and growth. It’s much easier to convey than in written text.
- Keeps content fresh and relevant – a high quality visual infographic can highlight information in a new way, giving readers a different perspective.
- Tells a story – Data tells a story, but the message gets lost when there is too much to digest. Taking large amounts of data, trimming it down, and turning it into an infographic makes the data less confusing and more compelling.
- Boosts SEO – Search engines need to be your friend. By adding images to text, it optimizes your content, making it different and easier for people to find you on the web. Your information loads faster. If your content takes too long to upload, your potential client has moved on.
Final thoughts
Infographics should be a key component of your content marketing. It could mean the difference between a sale or not. As a side note, whatever you add, be it a video, graph. or photo, make sure it is easy to read on a mobile device. People are most likely reading or searching on the go. This is another reason the speed of loading the information is critical.
Need help with creating those infographics? Contact me. I’d love to help you with your content marketing.
