In the past several years, images have become increasingly popular marketing and public relations assets. In particular, we’ll look at storytelling through photographs, image-sharing applications (Instagram and Pinterest in particular), and delivering complex data clearly with infographics. As with other forms of content, success in this area comes from a focus on your buyers and creating the images that will be valuable to them as they consider doing business with your organization.

Photographs as Compelling Content Marketing

With all the talk about image-sharing services like Pinterest and Instagram, sometimes a basic premise of communication practice is lost. Images are important in all your marketing content. Don’t get so excited about the latest tool that you forget about the value of the image itself.

For example, consider Zürsun Idaho Heirloom Beans. The company was the first to offer authentic heirloom beans and unusual legumes to customers worldwide via specialty stores. Dozens of bean, lentil, and pea varieties are available, with colorful names like Dapple Grey, Scarlet Runner, White Emergo, and Tongues of Fire. “The glorious true-to-size pictures, carefully taken in natural light, have done more to promote the beans than any words possibly could,” says Allison Boomer, the founder of Eco-Conscious Food Marketing. Boomer worked with Zürsun on website design and content.¹

It seems so simple, doesn’t it? Photos help to tell a story, particularly for a product that comes in unusual shapes and colors. Yet so many marketers rely on boring stock photos that make their organization appear lazy and uncaring and that hide the uniqueness of their products.

You can read about the beans on the site: “Zürsun heirloom beans are grown on small-scale farms in the Snake River Canyon region of south central Idaho known as the Magic Valley Growing Area. The area’s arid climate, rich, well-drained loamy soil, moderate temperatures and stable moisture level—internationally recognized as having ideal environmental conditions for bean growing—produce pure, distinctly flavorful beans, superior to common store-bought beans.” Sounds yummy, right? Sure, the text Boomer wrote is compelling. But the beautiful photos seal the deal and get buyers to place an order.

“I was careful about writing the content,” she says. “However, it turns out the photos resonated so much more with customers than the text. I didn’t anticipate this going into designing the site, so I was lucky. Zürsun has reached an awesome tipping point, for which I give much credit to the website and those glorious bean photos. Sales in the last year have doubled. Responding to the many inbound queries through the website has become a daily task for me.”

As you’re creating the content for your site and blog, learn from the success of Zürsun Idaho Heirloom Beans: Shoot original photographs to tell your story to your buyers. Even organizations without photogenic product offerings can use images. As we will see next, even sellers of commodities and intangible services can still get into the photo game with Instagram and other new photo networking services.

Images of Real People Work Better Than Inane Stock Photos

Several years ago, I helped my mother evaluate senior living centers. My father was suffering from Alzheimer’s, so we needed a place that also had a memory care facility onsite.

As I checked out one website after another, I was disheartened that so many used stock photos to depict residents and staff. Ugh. I just don’t feel good about a place that doesn’t focus on reality. A bunch of photos of generic happy seniors playing cards and riding bikes doesn’t inspire me to entrust my parents to this organization.

If you’ve heard me speak live, you might have seen my riff on stock photography, a subject I wrote about in a blog post titled “Who the Hell ARE These People?”² This is one of my most popular posts, so the subject obviously strikes a nerve with other marketers and entrepreneurs as well.

Using models from a stock photography catalog in your content is insulting to your customers and to your employees. It doesn’t reflect the reality of your organization. At one facility I checked out, The Greens at Cannondale, the image for spa treatments and salon services was just outrageous! It showed a middle-aged woman with her hair wrapped in a towel. She’s gazing knowingly against a Photoshop-perfect blue sky, her arms folded atop a folksy wooden fence. I’ve been to several senior living facilities in the past several years and this looks like no place I’ve ever seen. If this woman existed, she’d be living on a ranch outside Santa Fe, not in a seniors community in Wilton, Connecticut. There’s no way spa treatments at The Greens at Cannondale look anything like this.

This generic approach doesn’t fly at Omaha, Nebraska–based Heritage Communities, a company that runs 14 senior living facilities. There were images and videos of actual residents throughout the site. Since it’s so unusual to take this approach, the homepage even points out the fact: “All photographs proudly feature residents of Heritage Communities.”

“We hired David Radler, an amazing photographer, to shoot at a handful of our buildings,” says Lacy Jungman, director of sales and marketing at Heritage Communities. “Some were staged and some were candid shots. They are of the highest caliber, taken with dignity to show each resident’s best attributes—but also to show their humanity. Additionally, since we had such great photos, we are able to share them with family members.”

I love the photos. Many tell fun stories of Heritage Communities. There is one I particularly like, showing six residents around a pool table. They’re wearing realistic clothes and standing with realistic postures, and you can see out a real window to some trees and another building. There’s no set and no props and no models. It’s just six men playing pool, guys I’d like to spend some time with. I’m imagining some hysterical conversations as they go at it in the afternoon.

Nate Underwood, chief financial officer of Heritage Communities, shared that the company is doing great. Obviously, website photo policies are a tiny part of the work of this company, but this practice indicates to me that the company cares, goes a little further than the rest, and wants to make a difference. I’m not surprised that attitude has been rewarded with strong financials.

One of the most common excuses I get from marketers is they have trouble getting photo releases from people. But this habit can become a part of an organization’s culture.

“Whenever a resident moves in our communities, we ask them to sign a photo release,” Lacy Jungman says. “Most sign, but some have declined. After we shot the photos, we made sure each resident had a photo release signed, and those who didn’t, we either secured a release at the time or didn’t use the photo. We had key associates at each building guiding us to residents who were willing to participate in the photo shoot and also had signed a photo release.”

Sometimes people ask me about what to do when an employee no longer works for the company, or after someone is no longer a customer. Do you still use the photo? Tough question, but I generally answer “yes.” For Heritage Communities, there’s an emotional issue of what to do with photos of a resident who has passed away.

“Some families prefer we do not use an image of their loved one after they pass, because the pain and grief of their loss are still raw,” Jungman says. “Seeing that person posted on a website or billboard may stir up too much emotion. Others look at these images as yet another legacy their loved one is leaving, another imprint on the world. Adult children have expressed how honored they are to have their mom or dad remembered in this light—smiling, happy, full of life. When one of our residents passed away, we had his photo framed and matted. We were able to give this gift of love to the family, who were beyond grateful to have such a wonderful reminder of his good days.”

Jungman adds, “The stories, feelings, and emotions of our residents are what we wanted to capture. Life isn’t flawless like stock photography might want us to believe. Transparency is a big deal to us, and this was an excellent opportunity to showcase what actual people living in our communities are really like.”

Photos are important, and people recognize a stock photo instantly. For any product or service, but especially a people-focused one like healthcare, please use real people.

How to Market an Expensive Product with Original Photographs

When Boston-based creative director Doug Eymer was ready to sell his home, he turned to photo-sharing services to get images of the home out to prospective buyers. “We had a unique house in a great spot on the water, and we knew that water is prime real estate,” Eymer says. “We also had an incredible view. We felt like that added a significant amount to the price of our house, although it’s not something you can really measure. So I started documenting sunrise every morning, and putting the photos together into a collection. What’s really cool is how the marsh grasses changed colors and the leaves in the background changed colors. It was an ever-changing view.”

Eymer snapped the photo each morning and shared the series Sunrises at 31 Bow Street (well over 100 photos) on a wide variety of social networks and photo-sharing sites, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,³ 500px,⁴ and Flickr. “On 500px I had sets with all of my photographs, including a set for my sunrise photographs. 500px is great for followers; as soon as you post, you start getting feedback right away. Usually it’s like one or two words: ‘Love it,’ ‘Great.’ And 500px also gives you a lot of information about the activity on your photos. You can see what people are responding to.”

When Eymer listed his home with a Realtor, the photo series became a valuable asset, which the Realtor linked to. “The Realtor that we used was pretty web-savvy,” Eymer says. “He was posting information on his blog about the photos, and he mentioned them on Facebook and Pinterest.”

Documenting the view from his home as the seasons changed was a subtle but very effective form of marketing. “It brought a lot of attention to our house, especially from people in town, and that’s built positive word of mouth,” Eymer says. “There were a few people who responded every morning, and I think they looked forward to seeing what photograph I was going to post. When I first started, we had a red canoe that was in the yard, and I always made the red canoe part of the photograph. One day we had some high water, and we moved the canoe so it wouldn’t float away. People said, ‘What happened to the canoe? Where did it go?’ Then someone made the leap of, ‘It looks like summer’s over. The canoe has been put away.’ That was pretty interesting. It was just one little thing, people letting me know that they were actually watching.”

Eymer also brought his photo series into the offline world to market his home when buyers were viewing it. In various rooms, he had laptop computers and iPads running a continuous slide show of his photos of the ever-changing view toward the water from 31 Bow Street. “As buyers walked through the house, especially the rooms which overlook the view, we showed how it changed over time. There’s summer, the beautiful changing leaves, and photos of wintertime with ice. It gives people another window on what’s outside, and gives them an idea of what is there to look at.”

Eymer successfully sold his house and credits the photo series he created as an important aspect of his marketing.

Original photos, shared on Instagram and other photo-sharing social networking services, are a powerful way to showcase your offerings. And when you take your photos and integrate them into your online and offline marketing, you set yourself apart from the pack.

Why I Love Instagram

It’s rare that I get particularly excited about a new social network, but that’s what happened to me when I first joined Instagram.⁵ Instagram is a photo-sharing application for iPhone and Android that makes it easy and fun to manipulate a photo; a variety of filters turn a snapshot into instant art. Then, with a few clicks, you can share your photo and caption to your Instagram followers and on other networks. While there are other photo-creation and photo-sharing applications, Instagram has quickly become the most popular, with more than one billion people who use it every month.

I love that Instagram makes it so easy to create and share content. One of the first things people push back on in my conversations with marketers and entrepreneurs is how much time it takes to create content and publish it on the web. Many say they just can’t manage to create daily content. But Instagram is so easy! It just takes a minute or two to shoot a photo, manipulate it with the filters, and share it with your network. Other critics tell me they’re lousy writers and are therefore hopeless on social sites. But with Instagram, you do almost no writing, so even word-challenged people can create awesome content.

I’ve taken hundreds of photos as I’ve traveled the world, and my several thousand Instagram followers can see what I’ve been up to in just a few seconds.⁶ If I want, I can also share the Instagram photo on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I love it.

While Instagram started as a photo sharing social network, the service now offers video sharing as well as Instagram stories, a way to curate your life to share with your friends.

Many entrepreneurs use Instagram to capture ideas related to their business. Rachel Brathen, a Swedish native living in Aruba, is an internationally respected yoga instructor. She uses her Instagram feed (@yoga_girl) to share aspects of her life to her two million followers and help her potential clients learn more about her interests. Sure, there are some shots of her doing yoga poses, but she also shares images of beautiful scenery and of her friends.

There are tens of thousands of social networks out there. Many are copycats of existing networks or merely add incremental feature changes. These networks don’t succeed. Truly original ideas for social networks are rare—I can count on one hand the number that made me say “wow.” YouTube makes video sharing easy. Twitter is for sharing short messages. Facebook is for connecting with friends; and Instagram, for beautiful photos. Instagram is cool because it combines content sharing (photos) with artistic expression. It’s addictive, at least for me. When I have a few minutes of downtime, I like to pull out my iPhone and scroll through the photos of the people I follow on Instagram. It’s like a stroll through an art gallery.

Okay, so Instagram is a fun way to share photos with your social network. But how can you use it to market your product or service?

Marketing Your Product with Photos on Instagram

Nantucket Island is my favorite surfing spot. When I’m there, I’ll frequently take a lesson at Gary Kohner’s Nantucket Island Surf School. Kohner grew up on Nantucket and started surfing in 1984. He founded the school in the summer of 1999 to share his love of surfing and the ocean with others. Besides offering lessons for people of all ages and weeklong surf camps for kids, Kohner also rents surfboards, stand-up paddleboards, and wetsuits. He is an avid photographer and shares photos almost daily on his @nantucketsurfing Instagram feed.

Kohner uses simple equipment that anybody can master: a GoPro in the water and an iPhone on land. “I’m a little OCD about certain things I enjoy,” Kohner says. “I enjoy taking the pictures. I enjoy playing with the editing tools on Instagram and then putting it out there. It doesn’t feel like it’s a work thing. It’s something I do for fun. I try to keep it fresh and keep it interesting so I figure it gives people something to look at.”

Instagram is a great social network to share about any product or service that has a visual component or customers who use the product in interesting ways. It also allows those who don’t feel as comfortable creating written content to get their ideas out there.

Kohner shoots a bunch of photos from the water and then looks to find the best ones to post. “If I’m using the GoPro while surfing, I usually have it on an automatic setting. I’ll come in sometimes with over 1,000 pictures. I go through them quickly and weed out the ones that are junk, because a lot of those pictures are just not good and you can tell right away,” he says. “I will pick out the top 50 or so that look the best, and out of those 50, I usually pick the top three or four that I really like. I’ll save them and use them for Instagram. That’s why I’m able to post stuff daily. If I go out surfing one day and take a bunch of shots, I can save those up and post them over the next week.”

Kohner sometimes posts epic shots of a really good surfer on an awesome wave, but he also posts beginners standing up for the very first time during a lesson. “It’s a nice moment to capture,” Kohner says. “I wish I had a shot of my first ride when I was a kid. [My account is] an Instagram for the surf school, so it makes sense not just to have surfers inside a tube [a cresting and breaking wave that is challenging to surf], but have it more accessible to everybody.”

When Kohner posts shots of people surfing, they often repost on their own Instagram accounts, which extends his reach. “I have a lot of kids who taken lessons with me follow me on Instagram,” Kohner says. “I’ll ask the parents, especially if they’re younger kids, ‘Hey, I’m going to take some pictures; if I get a good one, is it cool if I put it on my Instagram?’ And the parents almost always agree. I tag the surfer and the kids love it. They say: ‘Oh, I’m on Gary’s Instagram! I’m on the surf school Instagram! I’m famous!’ And they share on their Instagram with their friends. So much of my business here in Nantucket is word of mouth; I’m sure that my Instagram is helping.”

I know for a fact Kohner’s Instagram is helping market his business. When people who know I love surfing ask how to get started, I just point them to Kohner’s wonderful photos. That often leads to them signing up for lessons.

Instagram allows users to comment on each other’s photos. Many people pay attention to those who tag them in these comments. If you use Instagram for your business, you should pay attention, too. For example, when I shared a photo of me wearing my Nantucket Surfing T-shirt and hat on Hawaii’s North Shore, I included this caption (tagging Kohner’s Instagram ID): “Showing my @nantucketsurfing colors at Sunset beach prior to watching the Vans Triple Crown.” Kohner responded to me: “I’ll be there tomorrow! How long are you going to be around the North Shore?” And I replied: “Hey Gary. I just left. . . . Have fun! It was my first time and loved it.” A friendly approach like Gary’s is a great way to acknowledge or endorse customers who take the time to talk about you and your product or service.

Kohner’s Instagram helps keep his business top of mind with the typical family that visits Nantucket for a few weeks each summer. When the kids follow Kohner’s photos all year long and Mom and Dad ask the kids what they want to do while on Nantucket Island, the first thing they’re going to say is that they want to go back and take some surfing lessons. “A lot of people are away doing their thing in the winter,” Kohner says. “They don’t surf year-round, so I remind them of that memory of surfing, the time they spent in Nantucket. If they’re coming back, it’s going to be ‘Let’s go surfing!’”

Sharing with Pinterest

Many organizations create original photographs, like Doug Eymer did to market his home. And like Eymer, many share those photos on Pinterest, a pinboard-style social network. Think of Pinterest as the virtual equivalent of a bulletin board where you can “pin” items of interest to come back to later. The marketing aspect is that other people can see your “boards” to follow what you find interesting. In addition, if you create interesting visual content, people will pin it (from your website) or repin it (from Pinterest), driving traffic to your site. Pinterest boasts nearly 300 million users as of this writing and is growing very quickly.

Whole Foods Market, which started with a small store in Austin, Texas, in 1980, is now the world’s leader in natural and organic foods. There are more than 300 Whole Foods stores in North America and the United Kingdom. The company uses Pinterest⁷ to showcase a wide variety of foods in interesting categories. Like Eymer, Whole Foods uses original photography to display its product offerings. As I write this, Whole Foods has some 450,000 followers and more than 5,000 pins on 44 boards, which include Who Wants Dinner?! (144 pins), Eat Your Veggies (217 pins), and Cheese Is the Bee’s Knees (56 pins).

Pinterest is also frequently used to share things you like that aren’t your products or services but that get people interacting socially with you. For example, one Whole Foods board⁸ showcases photographs of designer kitchens. Whole Foods isn’t in the kitchen business, but the food the company sells is, of course, to be prepared in home kitchens. Many of the kitchen photos have hundreds of repins, and many have multiple comments. One commenter wrote, “We live in Maryland now, however, plan to move to Florida by the New Year. I am getting some great ideas for our new/used home.”

While creating and sharing content on your own board is a great way to showcase your organization, Pinterest is also extremely valuable as a source for inbound links to your web content, including your blog posts, videos, and images. Many people use Pinterest as a sort of virtual scrapbook, a way to catalog information that is important to them. Others use it as a reminder tool. These people might pin your stuff, which others will then be able to see.

For example, if I’m planning a vacation to a beach resort, I might catalog the locations I’m considering by making a board. It’s simple to save the images or videos of the resorts as pins, which point to the web page or blog post where I found the image or video. It takes just seconds. Then I can share my “Dream Holiday” board with family members or friends, and they can help me decide where to stay. Then, after my holiday, I can make another board cataloging the places I visited, restaurants I ate at, and activities I enjoyed. These pins then become recommendations for others.

As I said, it’s the social sharing of boards that creates the opportunity for marketing, because others can see my boards, too. Maybe friends or colleagues want to take a similar holiday. All I need to do is point them to my pinboard. Imagine how great that is for the owners of the restaurant I loved—people are sharing my content, introducing that restaurant to an audience of new customers.

To succeed with Pinterest, you need to—you guessed it—publish great content for people to pin. And that content needs to be visual. That means you need to have photographs, videos, and infographics on your blog and site. For example, that restaurant I enjoyed on holiday would be smart to have its current menu available as an image ready to be pinned. The restaurant might also have photos of each dish and the labels of the wines it serves. Interior photos of the tables and exterior shots of the building might make sense, too, particularly if the restaurant has unique design elements. The availability of these images makes it easy for happy diners to pin what they liked.

Whatever your business, you should have content available that people are eager to share. To make it really easy for them to pin your content, you should have a “Pin it” button on each piece of online content. Just like the Facebook “Like” button and the Twitter “Tweet” button, the Pinterest “Pin it” button helps get your content to others via their boards. I have a “Pin it” button at the bottom of each of my blog posts and get many pins of my posts. One recent post was pinned nearly 100 times. Thus, there are 100 new places on the web pointing to that post, and the followers of those 100 people’s boards could choose to click through to read it. How great is that?! Pinterest is now an important source of many inbound links for my blog and for the content of all kinds of organizations. It’s an exciting way to get your content seen.

The Power of SlideShare for Showcasing Your Ideas

SlideShare has quickly become a valuable sharing platform and can be more powerful than YouTube or a blog if used well. However, most companies don’t know about SlideShare as a tool of social sharing. And many that do simply use the platform as a way to pitch products.

Essentially, SlideShare is a place to post slide presentations, those business standbys typically created in Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. Users can scroll through your slides on the SlideShare site and embed them into blogs and social network posts.

As I write this, my own SlideShare The New Rules of Selling⁹ has been viewed more than 300,000 times and shared more than 2,300 times on LinkedIn. It has also racked up more than 700 Facebook likes and been tweeted over 1,300 times. I’m stunned by this result! The first month of this presentation’s life on SlideShare was the fastest sharing of any of my content in more than a decade of sharing free stuff on the web. The SlideShare has spread the word way beyond my own network to reach many people who have never been exposed to my ideas. Here are some lessons I learned. I hope they’ll help you achieve similar results for your business.

LESSON 1: Focus on what you are giving away rather than the product you are selling. I created the SlideShare to showcase the ideas in my new book The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business. The SlideShare release was timed to coincide with the release of the book in September 2014.

Rather than talk about my new book on social networks and in media interviews, I chose instead to promote the SlideShare. This approach differed from the vast majority of book launches, where authors and publishers focus too much on selling books.

The same is true for any type of launch—most marketers focus too much on the product or service. When you focus on offering something of value for free, you generate interest in the products you sell.

LESSON 2: Put your best work out there. I chose not to hold anything back in the SlideShare. I shared my best ideas, for free. Sure, most people will choose to use the free content rather than purchase my book. But many will want to dig into more details and be eager to purchase it. Either way, I benefit from increased name recognition and influence with both groups.

LESSON 3: The social sharing aspect of SlideShare is powerful. There is a heavy graphical element in SlideShare content, and people love to share images. Thus, many will share your content for you, extending your network as a result.

Much of that sharing will take place on LinkedIn, which now owns SlideShare and has made sharing there very simple. This connection offers you a great opportunity to reach senior contacts on a premier business social network.

LESSON 4: People are looking for content to showcase. The fact that so many SlideShare views come from embeds on other sites reminds us that many people are looking for valuable content to share with their readers. If you create something that publishers like, they will help you to reach new audiences. Remember: Success on the web is all about helping other people solve their problems.

LESSON 5: You need a great design, as SlideShare is a visual medium. Its power comes from people’s ability to process and understand your ideas quickly. I can create serviceable PowerPoint and Keynote slides, but I’m certainly not a designer. So I hired a designer to help me create my SlideShare. It cost me some money and took more time, but many people commented on the design. I am sure it helped extend the content’s reach.

LESSON 6: One idea per slide. There are 158 slides in my SlideShare. Everyone I spoke with prior to launch said that was way, way too many slides. Many SlideShare presentations consist of only 20 or so slides. But I’m not a fan of cramming a bunch of ideas onto each one. The number of slides doesn’t seem to have been a problem.

SlideShare is a powerful tool that can be used to showcase your ideas, too. It doesn’t matter if you have a consumer product or are a B2B brand; the easy-to-share visual medium of SlideShare gets your ideas into the marketplace and helps you grow your business.

Infographics

We finish this chapter on marketing using visual images with a discussion of information graphics (or simply “infographics”), which are graphical representations of complex data, information, or knowledge. Infographics take advantage of the human ability to visualize very complex data quickly. For most people, a visual representation is much easier to understand than columns of numbers or percentage representations, which is why I have used several in this book such as those on pages 177 and 178. For example, a map of a train or metropolitan transit system is an infographic, with train lines characteristically appearing as different colors. Frequently, the major stations where you can change trains figure prominently, and sometimes the maps note the neighborhoods each line serves. Can you imagine using the London Underground without the Tube map? It would be nearly impossible!

Increasingly, marketers are delivering complex data to buyers in the form of infographics. Typically offered as an image file or PDF on a website or blog, an infographic that delivers information in a useful way is highly valuable to buyers. It may also be shared via social networks, including Pinterest.

As examples, a few infographics I like are “The World’s Biggest Real Estate Bubbles in 2018” and “The Raw Materials that Fuel the Green Revolution.” This kind of content is best shown as a graphic rather than as text or numbers. Another, The Sequel Map published by BoxOfficeQuant, a blog about film statistics, graphically compares whether movie sequels are better or worse than their original, based on the consensus opinion of professional film critics from Rotten Tomatoes. In seconds, I can take in the relative sales ratios of movies and their sequels. The graphic is much easier to grasp than a table with star ratings.

To learn about the ins and outs of creating infographics for marketing purposes, I spoke with Marta Kagan, director of brand and buzz for marketing software company HubSpot. “We’re extremely dependent on data here: love it, live by it,” she says. “Using infographics allows us to cherry-pick the juiciest pieces to draw your eye to what’s most relevant in a very appealing way.”

Kagan continues: “The other way we use infographics a lot is to explain processes or to tell a story. We do that with our infographic ‘The History of Marketing.’¹⁰ With the short attention span people have as a result of all the devices they use and how much information everyone juggles at any given time, an infographic grabs your eye, it gives you a headline, and it includes color in a way that a text blog post can’t. You can bookmark it and look at it later, share it, or subscribe. Whenever there’s a thirst for information about how to do something, why I need to do it, what’s the adoption rate, those types of things, we have a lot of success compiling that as an infographic, because it’s a visual and highly shareable format.”

Creating a good infographic is more like doing a video than writing a text blog post, because so many elements need to come together. “You’re telling a story in a very visual medium,” Kagan says. “Buyers’ brains are wired to work differently with images, and they notice different things than when they are just reading straight text. So we have to basically lead you down a path of visual cues through how we create the hierarchy of the information. This is different from reading; you read from left to right, from top to bottom.”

HubSpot brings employees with varying skills into the process of creating infographics. “Part of our marketing team will focus on brainstorming ideas around what’s the topic we want to cover,” Kagan explains. “Another group may be the ones that actually pull together the data, either from our own sources or research from external sources. Another few folks will actually then map out the story like you would for a video.

“Is it vertical? Is it horizontal? What’s the art direction around it? Is there photography? Is this handwritten? What’s the style? What’s the tone we’re trying to strike? All those questions need to be answered like they would for a video or for another creative piece of media.”

HubSpot has a team of in-house graphic designers who create the final artwork. If you don’t have your own team, there are a number of options. You can make a simple infographic in PowerPoint. Kagan’s team at HubSpot has developed a free resource to make it easy: “The Marketer’s Simple Guide to Creating Infographics in PowerPoint.”¹¹ Another option is to use the templates offered by Piktochart, a drag-and-drop infographic editing tool. Or you can outsource the work. A company called Visually (visual.ly) has created a marketplace to tap the expertise of thousands of designers who can make an infographic for you.

Once the infographic is created, post it in appropriate places on your blog and website. You might consider sending links to your customers and the media that cover your industry. And don’t forget to put a “Pin it” button on the download page!

Marketing with photos and images is a fast-growing way to tell a story for your buyers. In combination with text-based content and video, images are an important component of any organization’s new marketing plan.