Infographic: How to Use Infographics for Lead Generation

I went to a women’s college, which meant I spent every Valentine’s Day handing out homemade cupcakes and asking students to buy tickets to the annual production of The Vagina Monologues (which I was always in). At the time, I didn’t know the experience was a lesson in lead generation.

It was incredibly frustrating to hand someone a cupcake and deliver my spiel about the play, only to have them say, “Oh, that’s cool” through a mouthful of icing and walk away. “It took forever to mix that icing. It’s vegan buttercream,” I’d grumble, not realizing that I had botched lead generation and had only barely spread brand awareness.

Infographics, as we all know, are the vegan buttercream of content marketing. If data is your sugar, then your visual metaphor is your coconut milk, and any imbalance in your ingredients will come out unappetizing and strange. Each infographic takes a lot of time to produce. Once copy has been delivered to the design team, your marketing department is in for several rounds of tweaking little details.

If you’re hoping to use your infographic as a lead generation tool, you don’t want your audience to simply look at it and walk away. The digital marketing blog Spiralytics just released a pretty meta infographic about crafting lead generation infographics, and it’s full of statistics and tips that we shared below.

Among other things, notice that LinkedIn is your optimal spot for gathering leads from infographics. According to data from Hubspot, the Content Marketing Institute, and five other sources noted in the infographic, 65 percent of marketers see leads coming in from the professional platform.

If you use all this data to optimize your infographics, you’ll hopefully nab a few interested parties when you share your visual content online. Don’t just let them take the cupcake and walk away. After all, you have a show to promote.