By Lisa D. Jenkins

Aesthetically appealing, colorful collages of text and imagery that combine to quickly share complex information in bite-sized quips of stats. They drive shares, visibility and clickthroughs at an accelerated rate. They’re infographics, and they’re everywhere.

If you’re ready to add info graphics to your own online content strategy, here are some basics to get you started.

What’s Your Message?

To build a coherent visual representation, you need a focused story line. You have to know what you want to say. What data will you use? Do you want to:

• Tell the story of your brand?
• Segment industry stats?
• Generate product visibility?

Kraft used the occasion of the Oreo’s 100th birthday to demonstrate the cookie’s history with an infographic.

Why Are You Sharing Your Message?

The answer to this question is not, “Everyone has an infographic so we need one, too.” As with any marketing endeavor, there has to be a goal for investing resources into creating your content. Aside from driving traffic, will your infographic:

• Create brand affinity or loyalty?
• Educate stakeholders on trends?
• Ask viewers to self-segment so you can refine marketing campaigns?
• Convert prospects to customers?

The Walt Disney Company used this infographic to illustrate the success of Frozen.

How Will You Share Your Message?

Seriously. What do you want this to look like? All the things that go into creating a successful visual apply here. Take some time and align your design with your goal. Think about:

• Color palette
• Font choice and size
• Graphic elements
• Layout

Where Will You Share Your Message?

You’ve got your infographic published to your site, now what? As with any owned content, you’ve got to promote it. Make sure it’s branded so people can find you and help you meet your goal, then:

• Publish it to your social channels and remember to include the right size image preview for each platform.
• Submit it to infographic galleries; don’t forget Flickr.
• Allow people to embed your infographic.

Create Your Own Infographics

When you’re ready to tell your story with an infographic, here’s a list of DIY tools you can use.

• visual.ly
• easel.ly
• Picktochart
• Infogr.am

The appeal and importance of visual content, and infographics in particular, are undeniable. That said, I urge caution. The written word still holds value and as the use of infographics becomes more prevalent, I’m beginning to miss the days when people could connect their thoughts, ideas and data together with words.

I understand the attraction, but I fear a return to communicating solely with images and losing the nuance of language.