Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling

PATIENCE PAYS DIVIDENDS

It is exciting to create infographics that go viral and attract hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. However, it is important to remember that you can’t hit a home run every time—and that hitting singles and drawing walks is a good way to score runs as well. Say you create a piece for a niche audience that is exclusively targeted to a specific journalist and they post it, but it only sends 200–300 clicks back to your site. The number of visits or pageviews in your own analytics report does not tell the whole story. If you can see that thousands of people liked and shared your branded content on a publisher’s site, you know that there were even more brand impressions on your content, and perhaps best of all, in the context of a reputable third party talking about you rather than talking about yourself! The new relationship with a journalist and the exposure to a new audience are far more valuable than vanity metrics such as pageviews.

Ultimately, you must be patient, and it helps to measure your branding campaign’s success by asking your customers how they first heard of you, which will yield qualitative responses that wouldn’t appear in your analytics dashboard. Further, when you see traffic, links, customers, and press mentions continuing to come your way through a successful piece of content with a long shelf life that was published six months ago, you will start to taste the sweet benefits of residual payoff from the time and money you invested in ...