How to Create a Viral Infographic for Your Link Building Campaign

Intro

An infographic is a visual representation of data or information that shares actionable insights in an easy-to-consume format.

From a content marketing perspective, using infographics is an effective method to both improve the readability of your blog posts and build backlinks.

For example, at Merrative, we regularly incorporate infographics into our in-house publications as well as our guest posts. We make these infographics available for download, allowing us to collect emails that we later direct to our content marketing case studies newsletter. Currently, nearly 10% of our newsletter subscribers originate from downloads of infographics and templates, and our Domain Authority (DA) has grown from 15 to its current level of 37.

You too can get such a return on investment and beyond for your content marketing efforts using infographics. Here, we cover how to create a viral infographic for link-building campaigns.

Why use infographics for your content marketing?

Your infographic should have context and should complement your content piece. Here are five key reasons to include infographics:

1. Visual branding: Social media has driven the world to favor visual content over text. With infographics, it is possible to align your audiences’ perception of your brand with the brand’s colors, style, and typography. This helps improve brand recognition and recall.
2. Link building: Creating a good infographic is not everyone’s cup of tea. Many brands prefer to use infographics from credible brands in their content instead of making from scratch – which means you get a backlink as the source of the infographic used.
3. Better reading experience: Infographic images make it easy to grasp or skim content, make the blog visually appealing, save time in reading the blog post, and provide a way to save key information for future reference.
4. Increase lead capture: It is possible to capture website visitors' contact information by adding CTAs to infographics or enabling readers to download them.
5. **Repurpose old content: **You can breathe new life into existing blog posts or reports by repurposing the content into an infographic. This not only helps you make the most of your previous work but also presents the information in a new and engaging format.

Anatomy of a well-designed infographic

Well-designed infographics follow the best practices below:

Visualization:

• Colors: use your brand’s color palette such that it is easy on the eyes and complements the message you wish to convey.
• Design: the infographic should be skimmable with numbered navigation and distinct sections.
• Icons: invest in designing branded icons across all infographics to improve brand recall and make them visually appealing.

Content:

• Data: support your argument with up-to-date data taken from credible sources.
• Story: adopting storytelling techniques to design the infographic will make it more shareable and consumable.
• Insights: the infographic should provide unique insights about the topic or solution to a problem that makes readers save it for future reference.

Representing your brand:

• Call to action (CTA): what action do you want the reader to take after they consume the infographic? – make it clear. Include only 1 CTA to avoid potential decision fatigue.
• Plugging your brand’s value proposition: focus on providing value to the reader and don’t be overly promotional. Providing internal frameworks, management insights, results achieved by your customers, or product data are some subtle ways to plug your brand.
• Make infographics actionable: including actionable content in the infographics is the best way to get more ‘shares’ and ‘saves’.
• Content upgrade: to capture leads, consider offering a content upgrade related to the infographic. For instance, you can provide a downloadable PDF version or additional resources in exchange for the audience's email address. Include internal links by adding reference blogs or resources.

Infographic distribution – building an outreach strategy for link building

Distribution is key to avail the benefit of infographics. An effective way to do this is to get your infographic linked or embedded by relevant websites. Here’s how to go about building an outreach strategy for the same:

Step 1: Analyze trends to find viral topics

Publications and news editorials tend to post about current trending topics to capture the audience's attention at the earliest. By creating an infographic that falls into such topics, it is easier to convince them to link since it saves them time on creating visuals to make their blogs more engaging.

For example, many creators designed infographics around chatGPT prompts across industry use cases when it launched. These were heavily shared across social media and picked by journalists.

Step 2: Research keywords for the chosen topic

Find trending keywords from Google Keyword Planner for the chosen topic. Incorporate them into your content, infographic title, alternative text, and image caption. Doing so makes your infographic discoverable in social media and search engines.

You can also do a quick SERP check on Google using the formula “add keyword phrase” + “infographic” to study existing ranking websites that include infographics for your target keyword.

Step 3: Publish the infographic and make it shareable

Publish the infographic on your website with supporting content or as a visual in a blog post first. You can create a separate infographic section on your website that makes them accessible for download or provide embedded links for usage.

Then, promote the infographic on social media, directories, or communities. You can also approach influencers in your target topic to get a boost in reach. Doing so will increase the chances of getting organic backlinks and initial eyeballs on your infographic.

How to use social media for infographic distribution

1. Pinterest marketing:

   Pinterest is a popular social media for discovering and sharing links, including infographics. Use a Pinterest for Business account to create a board of your infographics by sharing links, adding keyword-rich descriptions, and using hashtags. You can join group boards to submit your pins to increase visibility.

2. Instagram marketing:

   You can format your infographics into reels, stories, or posts to increase visibility in the Instagram community. Use relevant captions as a call-to-action to optimize your posts for ‘shares’ and ‘saves’. Collaborate with Instagram influencers to increase reach and engagement.

3. Reddit marketing:

   Reddit has many useful subreddit communities across various topics where you can share your infographics as posts or links. You can also find existing posts relevant to your topic and engage with your infographic as a comment. It also has a dedicated infographics subreddit – R/Infographic

Step 4: Find websites to reach for linking

Create a list of relevant websites and blogs that could potentially benefit from your infographic.

Find blogs: find websites and blogs by using the search operator “add keyword phrase” + “blog”. You can list the websites in search results to approach.

Analyze competitor blogs: the search operator “add keyword phrase” + site: your-competitor-domain.com helps find web pages that include your target keyword published by your competitors.

Competitor backlink analysis: another way to find relevant websites is to perform competitor backlinks analysis. Tools like Ahrefs or Semrush can help you find backlinks by analyzing the URLs of any blog or website page by your competitors. You can target your outreach to these websites that have backlinked them.

Step 5: Drafting pitch for linking the infographic

Analyze the websites and find pages or blog posts where you think your infographic can add value.

For example, this post on the Epilogue blog by Merrative lists 12 inclusions in a content brief – and summarizing it using an infographic can help create a template that could result in downloads for you.

Now, you can simply draft a cold email pitch to the content manager on how your infographic can add value to this blog post. If you receive a positive response, then request a backlink to the same infographic published on your website.

Here’s a sample email pitch template:

Hi (YOUR NAME),

I came across your blog post on the topic [ADD BLOG TOPIC] while researching about [ADD KEYWORD].

I loved [ADD BLOG POST COMPLIMENT]

I'm reaching out to you because I've just created an infographic related to [YOUR INFOGRAPHIC TOPIC]. I think it could be a valuable addition to your article because [ADD REASON].

I’ve attached the infographic to this email for reference. If you would like to embed it into your blog post – I am happy to share an embed link.

Thanks,

Your Name

Designation, Company Name

**Bonus: submit on infographic directories **

Infographic directories are websites that host a collection of visuals that anyone can discover and access for their purpose. Here are 15 infographic directories you can explore for submission:

1. Slideshare
2. Infographics Archives
3. eLearning Infographics
4. Visualistan
5. Design marketplaces like Behance or Dribbble
6. Daily Infographic
7. Cool Infographics
8. Flickr
9. Infographic Bee
10. Infographic Journal
11. Visual.ly
12. Infographic database
13. Submit Visuals
14. Graphs.net [PAID]
15. Powershow

If you have built a collection of infographics as a dedicated website section, you can launch them as a digital product on directories like Product Hunt.

Here’s a handy gist of the infographic link-building strategy and tips for pitching to publications – download

Examples of companies that leveraged infographics for business growth and brand recognition

We have listed four examples of brands that have successfully implemented infographic marketing for your inspiration:

Finshots

Finshots is a media company that simplifies complex financial news and concepts. In the Founders Unfiltered podcast, Finshots founder Shrehith Karkera mentions how designing infographics enabled them to create digestible content and build an audience:

“I remember our first story got only 600 reads. We were desperately trying to keep Finception alive, and at that point, we had a turning point that completely changed everything for us. Jet Airways had shut down operations and we wanted to write a story on it. One of our interns, whose name is Urvashi, pointed out – well, we should do an infographic on how Jet Airways lost its market share over the years. It seemed cool, but not something that would blow up. We made a bar chart video – and as soon as we launched, it went berserk with retweets from influencers and journalists, and our website blew up. Finally, we had our break.”

Data journalism by digital publications

Legacy publications like The Economist, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review, etc have separate data journalism and visualization sections where they publish data stories with high-quality graphics. This has improved their ‘credibility’ such that other websites and bloggers use these infographics for their content to borrow their industry and domain authority.

For example, the Financial Times shares ‘visual investigations’ and ‘visual stories’ to cover the latest and trending news.

Along with infographics, Bloomberg creates ‘interactive data products’ like the ‘Billionaires Index’ that get updated regularly and cited by other publishers.

The Scientist publishes unique infographic long-form articles and explainers in the science and technology space:

Venngage

Venngage is an infographic SaaS that uses ‘Guestographic’ as a way to promote its brand, get signups, and earn backlinks. Instead of guest posting, they collaborated with websites by contributing high-quality infographics made by them in exchange for links. Venngage published 200+ infographics that have contributed 200,000 organic sessions a month on its high-converting pages.

For example, they collaborated with Mention for their blog ‘Analysis of 11 Billion Mentions’ to create a relevant infographic that also included a CTA ‘Create infographics at Venngage’ in the end.

IIP Maps

IIP Maps is a map maker SaaS that creates infographic maps and publishes them on Instagram. It has gained 160k followers with 400+ posts, thus helping it promote its SaaS product and its capabilities.

Beyond static images – exploring interactive infographic campaigns

Infographics aren’t just graphs or long static images. With the rise of no-code tools, it is possible to make interactive infographics that work better in terms of engagement and virality.

Spotify’s Wrapped campaign

Spotify’s viral Wrapped campaign allows its users to view their music consumption patterns across songs, genres, artists, etc as fun infographics. It urges its users to share these creative images with their friends and on social media as posts – thus turning its users into active promoters of the Spotify brand.

Image: The New York Times

BBC’s generative infographics

BBC published an interactive infographic Will a Robot Take Your Job? Here, users can enter their job title, and it will return a unique and shareable infographic that explains the automation risk to your job.

Get started with executing a viral infographic campaign

Here are five important tips to keep in mind when strategizing for infographic marketing:

1. Cite your sources: including data sources from reliable websites makes your infographic credible. This raises the perceived credibility of your brand as a result.
2. Whitespaces: make it easy for the eyes to consume the infographic by using sufficient whitespaces
3. Create a template: turn your infographic into a downloadable template to turn website visitors into leads.
4. User-generated content: Include content from users and feature influencer quotes to make your infographic content more authentic and credible.
5. 800 px rule: based on Pinterest pins, the popular infographic width is around 800 px or more.

At Merrative, we provide thought leadership content services for long-form blogs, narratives, books, webinars, and data stories. We recommend our clients invest in infographics rather than adding random stock images to their content pieces. Clients who did so observed an increase in their blogs getting linked by other sites as references.

Today, Generative AI and no-code are making it cheap and fast to design infographics at scale. With the right strategy and tools, your brand can improve content engagement and industry authority at lower costs.