Common Infographic Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
The mistakes that kept 2012's infographic boom from paying off for many businesses, from uncredited data to formats that ignored how Pinterest worked.
Infographics were everywhere by early 2012, and that popularity created a flood of weak ones alongside the useful examples. These were the mistakes that separated infographics that spread from the ones that quietly disappeared.
Using data without sourcing it
An infographic built on numbers with no visible source looked plausible but earned no trust. Bloggers and journalists, wary of getting embarrassed by citing bad data, generally passed on infographics that didn’t show where the numbers came from.
The fix: cite every statistic at the bottom of the piece, linking back to the original report or study wherever possible.
Cramming in too much data
Some businesses treated an infographic as a way to dump an entire research report into one image. The result overwhelmed readers instead of clarifying anything, defeating the format’s entire purpose.
The fix: pick the three or four most interesting data points and build the piece around those, cutting everything that doesn’t support the core story.
Skipping the embed code
Plenty of otherwise solid infographics were published as a plain image with no way for another site to easily republish it with credit. That single oversight cut off the piece’s biggest source of backlinks before it even had a chance.
The fix: always include an embed code snippet beneath the graphic that lets other sites paste it in with an automatic link back to the source.
Ignoring Pinterest’s format
Infographics designed as wide, horizontal images built for a blog sidebar didn’t display well on Pinterest’s vertical, image-first layout, which was quickly becoming one of the format’s biggest distribution channels through 2012.
The fix: design with a tall, vertical aspect ratio in mind from the start, not as an afterthought for a platform added later.
Publishing and hoping
Many businesses treated the infographic itself as the finish line, publishing it on their own blog and waiting for shares to happen on their own. Most didn’t.
The fix: pitch the piece directly to a short list of relevant bloggers and journalists, and submit it to infographic directories, treating distribution as a required second step, not an optional bonus.
Making it an advertisement in disguise
Some infographics were so obviously built to promote a product, logo prominent, sales pitch worked into the data, that they read as an ad rather than a piece of useful content, and readers shared them accordingly: rarely.
The fix: keep the business’s branding to a small, unobtrusive credit line, and make the actual content useful enough to stand on its own without the sales pitch.
What ties these together
Every one of these mistakes treats the infographic as the goal instead of the vehicle. The businesses that got real value out of the format in 2012 treated it as one well-executed piece of a distribution plan, not a shortcut that would spread itself.
