If you are spearheading SEO or SMO for your small startup company, as many professionals find themselves doing in this day and age when social media is no doubt the biggest and most powerful marketing tool, you will likely have an opinion on infographics. Whether the popular and interactive form of data visualization is the blinking bane of your existence or the brightest and shiniest tool in your toolbox of tricks of the trade, there is no question that infographics are a daily player in your marketing work.
But the question that is in the heads of all who are involved in the promotion of their companies or organizations via social media is not whether infographics are a useful aid at pulling in customers or users. Rather, the question is whether infographics are here to stay, or not, in 2014. Because they are ever evolving, like their internet home, into new, informative and aesthetically pleasing visual assistants, infographics are invaluable and not limited to one style, shape or demographic. When it comes to presenting a good chunk of statistics, knowledge, or a plea for help, infographics are a succinct and memorable way of reaching out to a large and diverse audience with only a single graphic. Especially when it comes to fundraising campaigns, activism and raising awareness, and telling an important story that can only be told with both pictures and text, infographics are essential to modern story telling via online media.
Infographics are not going the way of the dodo bird in 2014. Instead, they remain the ultimate in visual aids: a visceral, colorful picture that tells a story in its imagery, information, styling and context. When fair arguments can be made that claim that creating more infographics is beating a proverbial dead horse, and that they are a content marketing trend that is done and over with, one must also realize that they have been such a valuable tool because they do work well. The answer to enjoying a successful 2014 is not banishing infographics to the back of the marketing closet, but developing and forging them into a useful tool that can carry its weight into the future. In order to hone and shape infographics to look like the current SEO scene, it is necessary to get more creative with them than has been the trend in the recent year. This means adding the element of motion to infographics, for example, or 3D visuals.
The ultimate point of infographics is no longer to gain back linking traffic or kick a number of keywords into motion via Google, but is now to be relevant, locally oriented, and impressive to customers and users. Visual.ly is the online world's number one site in terms of finding infographics that are pre-made to tell a story for you or to gain inspiration for creating one of your own. Finding graphics on everything from ancient Roman history to census data to the origins of coffee is a cinch on their website, and you will be able to get a grip on the design aesthetic of some of the most successful and popular infographics that have ever been. Carry your infographics proudly into the year 2014 and don't hold them to what they started as or what they have been. Adding other media elements into your infographic scheme, such as motion, HD quality imagery, interactively changing data, and sound can transform the graphic into a more cinema-esque experience rather than the still pictures that can no longer capture reader's attention as they used to.
Author Bio: This is a guest post by Sarah Brooks from Freepeoplesearch.org. She is a Houston based freelance writer and blogger. Questions and comments can be sent to brooks.sarah23 [at] gmail [dot]com.