Nowadays, attention spans are shorter, screen time is longer, and people are looking to engage with creative, new, and exciting content. This is where infographics come in. Infographics are graphic, visual representations made to display information clearly and concisely. 

If your tech startup’s written content is falling flat or you’re looking to spice up your content, infographics are an easy and effective way to make your data and information shine. Follow these four tips to make engaging infographics that target your different audiences.

Topic Choice is Key 

While infographics are a great way to drive engagement and freshen up your content, it’s up to you to make sure the topic of the infographic succeeds. B2B tech startups should do their research on trending hashtags, programs, and topics in their industry to make sure their infographic is relevant and on trend. 

Keep your audience in mind too, an infographic will only be as successful as the topic it covers, and successful topics target specific audiences. 

Pro tip: repurpose a past successful article into a tip sheet or graphic, that way you can build off of past interest and keep the momentum going! 

Make the data easy

Data visualization means turning numbers into visuals and charts, or as Scott Berinato, author of “Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations” describes it, “effective data visualization is a way of making sense of all the data, ideas and information.” 

Unfortunately, left brains and right brains don’t always come wrapped in one package. This means that good data visualization comes from collaboration. Making the information useful or informative while also eye-catching, trendy, and marketable means uniting your data analyzers and graphic enthusiasts and encouraging collaboration on visuals.

Investors and data driven audience members can see through under-researched data, small sample sizes, or phony trends. Make sure if you’re making data pretty, that the data used is not only real, but significant too. 

Ditch the essay

This one speaks for itself. The whole reason behind creating infographics is to make your content more accessible and efficient. The wordier the infographic is, the more likely people will be to scroll right past it. Emphasize these key copy elements instead of copy and pasting a full article into your design: 

• A good heading: Tell your audience what they’re about to see, use trending keywords, and make it bold. 

• Explanatory subheading: Explain, comprehensively, the points of your infographic, but do so in three sentences or fewer. 

• Data subtitles: Condense the main points of the data into brief sentences  

Try this test to check your copy: have someone look at your infographic quickly and ask if they can get the gist. If they can’t it’s likely because your core message is lost in a sea of words. 

Think about style and brand

Infographics are fun and playful, but the design can quickly get out of hand. Neil Patel recommends sticking to two fonts, and we couldn’t agree more. Anything more and your infographic risks looking messy.

Same goes for colors. Stick to your brand colors and avoid using the whole rainbow to make the graphic pop. Make sure to add your company logo and a backlink to your site, that way any shares will direct people back to your page. 

If you’re new to infographic creation consider using a premade template like these from Canva. These are especially helpful for tight deadlines and for infographic accompaniments for previously written articles.

About Mary Jenkins: Mary is a marketing and communications intern for Swyft, which is a PR firm in Austin and Houston and a top digital marketing agency in Denver since its founding in 2011. Swyft recently opened a satellite office where it offers PR in San Francisco.