Arguably the most important aspect of digital marketing is content creation. While some brands can focus directly on product promotion, many others must create alluring forms of content to attract audiences and generate attention.

Standard written content is an excellent way to absorb ideas and thoughts, but some prefer different methods of learning. Such desires helped inspire the creation of the infographic, a form of content used for years to boil down more complex ideas and explanations into simple ones.

While creating an infographic from scratch doesn’t take much expertise in theory, creating one that can truly reach large numbers of people and go viral requires a specific touch. Let’s look at how to maximize the influence of your upcoming infographics.

Find What’s Trending

Creating infographics that truly reach large numbers of people in a short amount of time involves more than just luck. Ultimately, you’ll need to conduct market research to uncover what people are interested in at the time. Through the use of analytics and trend features on sites like Google and Twitter, you can determine in real time which topics are most likely to produce viral infographic content.

While your brand may be focused on a particular niche and therefore not able to pursue infographics relating to any random topic, understanding concepts such as trends and search volume can still help within that niche. By pinging to Google a few simple queries, you’ll get an idea of which topic angles are most likely to produce an outcome that achieves maximum visibility.

Visualize the Data (Unconventionally)

The key to success for an infographic doesn’t just involve timeliness and trending topics, but also how the data is displayed. Most creators of successful infographics start out by first visualizing the data and its flow. However, a very matter-of-fact approach for infographics isn’t always the most effective strategy.

When creating the design and flow for your infographic, consider how you can make the data more titillating. This may involve the use of various logos, shapes and symbols, bright colors and unique photography. The potential for unique infographic design is endless, but consider carefully how to unconventionally display the data in a way that still resonates with your audience’s tastes.

Provide a Narrative

Story-telling is as old as time – and it remains just as important in today’s digital world. Your infographic should at its core attempt to paint a narrative, walking readers through each piece of data step-by-step. While making this form of content overly complex is not recommended, that doesn’t mean that the data-points and facts being shared shouldn’t convey a story or narrative.

Whatever the topic, there should be an underlying message. Much like when you’re pinging to Google your latest blog post (with the hopes that it will understand the theme and topic via word analysis), you also want readers to clearly understand the sentiment being impressed by the infographic. Whether you use humor or goodwill to articulate this is entirely up to you.

Various talents are required to create an effective infographic, including graphic design, story-telling, data analysis and creative skills. If these can all be brought together under the roof of one project, then influential and even viral infographics can be created. Take the information shared here and use it as a basis for formulating your next big visual content idea!