Shareable B2B Content Marketing at Its Finest: The Infographic

B2B Content Marketing Shareability

It is a marketing term that has risen in importance – it’s the classic “reuse and recycle” B2B content marketing principle. Shareability, a characteristic coined to communicate a particular piece of content’s propensity to be organically promoted and shared with others, extends the reach of your content by virtue of its attractive nature or relevancy. What piece of content does this more effectively than most all other pieces of B2B content marketing? The infographic.

From 2014 to 2015, infographics were the B2B content marketing asset type that saw the most increase in use: from 51% to 62% of marketers incorporating infographics in their B2B content marketing plan.¹

Moving into 2016, the influence of the infographic has only grown. So much so, that many marketers are claiming it’s to the point of “overuse.” And yet, infographics are liked and shared on social media 3X more than any other type of content.² With that kind of increase, many B2B marketers are convinced to incorporate infographics into their B2B content marketing plan. An infographic’s ability to create a captivating content experience that readers want to promote and share is unique within B2B content marketing.

Supporting its shareability is an infographic’s ability to effectively do the following 5 things to capture and engage readers:

1. Create a compelling visual content experience
2. Enhance a storytelling approach
3. Present quickly digestible information
4. Communicate to a broad visual audience
5. Display data and statistics that reinforce the underlying message

Visual Content Experience

With an infographic, you have an opportunity to create a content experience and not just a piece of content. This comes in extremely handy when using a persona-based approach to B2B content marketing to target a prospect in their specific phase of the buyer journey. Infographics become a powerful tool to custom tailor the overall impact of the content delivery to encourage forward movement towards a purchase decision.

With well-produced B2B content marketing infographics you can challenge your customer to absorb information in a new way that plays to your brands’ strengths. By visually presenting a concept in this new light you can introduce additional considerations. The order in which you stack insights, the positioning of a content block next to a supporting infographic with statistics, or even the carefully-selected icons representing bulleted points, for example, all influence how content is processed and understood.

Storytelling Approach

Unique to infographics is the ease of storytelling to communicate a statistic or convey a message or concept to a certain audience. By first outlining an infographic’s content topic and the key points, you can present information sequentially to ensure a reader processes the visual elements in a certain order. This is just like telling a story and is appealing in the way you can take readers on a journey before delivering a punch line, a key finding or a new industry insight.

Particularly effective about this B2B content marketing asset, which supports the infographic’s popularity and shareability, is its ability to create a narrative that carries from top to bottom through the piece of content. By the way colors are elicited to invoke emotion, icons suggest particular actions, and data representation through percent signs or X’s can or create a sense of urgency, infographics are telling a story.

Quickly Digestible Information

87% of B2B marketers agree that a major challenge they encounter is developing engaging content.³

The need to create B2B content marketing that can be quickly and easily digested is critical to ensure reader engagement. The often-colorful, visual nature of an infographic helps to capture the attention of a user, but the way that information is displayed in bite-size pieces is what can be incredibly effective.

For you B2B marketers who are struggling to develop engaging content, try developing an infographic. Reuse statistics and data from a white paper you posted last quarter, and break apart paragraphs into short excerpts that can intersperse throughout the body of the infographic.

Broad Audience

Perhaps best of all is the ability to engage a broad audience with an infographic. By this, we mean that infographics are a B2B content marketing asset type that can be used to target multiple personas at specific stages in the buyer journey. Try using an infographic as a content asset type to break up the blasé of email newsletters, lengthy blogs and white papers can engage even the hardest-to-reach audiences.⁴

Consider leveraging an infographic for your B2B content marketing calendar one month in lieu of a datasheet targeted at a C-suite audience in the consideration phase and see how it performs. In this instance, the shareable nature of an infographic plays to your advantage as it will likely be distributed cross-organizationally within your prospect’s company.

Data & Statistics

Last but not least, infographics are one of the singular most effective ways to present data, both qualitative and quantitative, in a complementary way that increases its effectiveness. Unlike most other B2B content marketing asset types, an infographic can visually display a list of statistics to drive home a certain point in the minds of your readers.

Take, for example, Forrester’s infographic on “predictive analytics” published earlier this year:⁵

With over 15 data points presented in a singular piece of content, Forrester has provided readers with a strong business case for why predictive analytics are an essential tool for CMOs to “thrive”, as they say. The power of the infographic to influence buyer behavior because of the sheer volume of data points that can be included to support a content topic is something few other B2B content marketing assets can claim.

For these 5 reasons and more, it is clear why infographics are easily shareable and have prolific influence in the B2B content marketing world. Curious to hear what we have to say about how effective B2B content marketing can drive incremental revenue for your organization? Contact us to learn more.

¹Content Marketing Institute, 2015, "2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends - North America"

²MassPlanner, 2015, “10 Types Of Visual Content To Use In Your Content Marketing”

³Forrester, 2014, “Most B2B Marketers Struggle to Create Engaging Content”

⁴Hubspot, 2014, “Why Are Infographics So Darn Effective?”

⁵Forrester, 2015, “Predictive Analytics Takes CMOs From Survive to Thrive”