6 Easy to Use Infographic Makers That Will Bring Your Data to Life
Data is beautiful.
It squeezes our reality into bite-sized stats and boils down complex patterns into lines and dots on grid paper. It’s also a powerful tool for your business’ marketing strategy, helping you create more engaging content and win over your audience.
Unfortunately, data has a reputation for being dry and boring—but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Infographics are highly shareable pieces of content that turn raw data and statistics into easy-to-understand, visually appealing graphics.
With infographics, you can create fresh content that communicates complex ideas to your audience at a glance.
As a business owner, you probably don’t have the time or budget to get great looking infographics designed on-demand. Thankfully, creating gorgeous infographics is simple with the right tools.
In this post, we’ve put together a collection of high quality infographic makers, designers, and generators that will boost your marketing efforts without breaking your budget or eating up your schedule.
Let’s get into it.
Why Infographics Are Valuable for Your Business
In a dark room, we search for human faces.
We look for symmetry and balance when we’re given nothing else—our minds seek out patterns and predictability in complete darkness.
That’s why data is one of the most effective weapons in your marketing arsenal. It helps paint a narrative for your audience, giving them the satisfaction of seeing the world fall into order behind your point.
Infographics Position You as an Expert
Data and statistics are powerful psychological triggers that help establish authority for your business and build trust with your audience. By providing your customers with the eye-catching stats and hard data behind your content, you can position your brand as an industry thought leader.
Infographics Help You Get Discovered
Infographics don’t just help prove your point either—visuals are huge for getting your content noticed. In fact, infographics are 30x more likely to be read than articles that are purely text and social media posts with images get 650% more engagement than text-only posts which means that visually engaging content will have a greater impact on your audience.
Infographics can also help attract new customers to your online store: They’re fantastic for link building which can improve your site’s ranking in search results and increase your discoverability. Be sure to follow SEO best practices when posting infographics, so that they can rank as high as possible.
Infographics Expand Your Influence
Infographics can also be picked up by major media outlets or credited as a source for coverage of similar topics if you use a solid PR and outreach strategy. By branding your infographic with your business’ logo, you’ll also be able to increase brand awareness as larger audiences are exposed to your business with every share.
Tips and Tricks for Designing Your First Infographic
Here are some handy tips and tricks for designing your first infographics using one of the online infographic makers below. Be sure to keep these in mind:
Do Your Research
Well-researched statistics are at the heart of every successful infographic.
From the very start of your research, you should stay organized by tracking all of your stats in a Google Sheet and keeping an eye on the data that you think matters to your target audience. This data should speak to their interests, help develop a more clear understanding of your topic, and validate the claim that you’re making.
Primary sources for your infographic can include customer surveys, interviews, and polls. For secondary sources, try to only use recent data from respected websites in your industry that backup statistics with trustworthy citations. Always fact-check and trace your stats back to their origin to make sure that they’re completely true and haven’t been altered.
Be Visual
Remember, the point of an infographic is to visualize data—not just to list off statistics. Display your data in engaging graphs and charts whenever possible to help communicate your point more effectively.
Before you start dropping in images and statistics, it’s also important to plan out your infographic to keep it organized. Try to create a wireframe or layout ahead of time. Even sketching your infographic out in a notebook can be a useful exercise for collecting your thoughts.
To plan out an effective wireframe for your infographic, take a look at these resources:
- The Infographic Layout Cheat Sheet
- 5 Infographic Layouts That Will Make Your Life Easier
- 9 Infographic Design Examples That Will Leave You Inspired
Think About Your Readers
To design a great infographic, you need to practice empathy. Put yourself in the position of your audience and try to think about how you can hold their attention from start to finish. Just like a great blog article, infographics need storytelling: Start with a hook and lead your readers along to a satisfying conclusion.
Thinking about your readers also means using simplicity to create a visually appealing piece. For instance, just because you can use 30 different colors, doesn’t mean that you should. Try to stick to visually pleasing, trustworthy color palettes and don’t overcomplicate things.
Now that we’ve taken a look at the fundamentals, let’s dive into our list of online infographic makers.
1. Venngage
Venngage is a highly customizable infographic maker that comes complete with a wide range of beautiful templates for designing reports, presentations, and posters.
From pie charts to pictograms, you’ll have access to tons of different ways to represent your data. You can also easily add new elements to your infographics with Venngage’s drag-and-drop editor.
Venngage also gives you full control over the look and feel of your infographic with an in-depth toolkit, letting you tweak your visuals until they’re just right.
With the free version of Venngage, you’ll be limited to a narrow set of templates and charts to build your own infographics. However, you’ll still be able to create some great looking pieces of content with just that small selection.
If you want to dive deeper into the world of infographics, there’s also a premium version available that gives you free reign over all of Venngage’s design tools and templates.
2. Easelly
Easelly is a lightweight infographic generator that lets you build highly engaging visuals—no previous design experience required!
Simplicity is Easelly’s greatest strength. While its library of themes and icons isn’t as extensive as some of the other platforms listed here, in just a few clicks, you’ll be able to generate infographics that are ideal for social sharing and blog posts.
Easelly is completely free, but only features a small set of ready-to-use images and icons. However, with the option to upload your own custom images, you’ll still be able to keep your infographics interesting.
3. Piktochart
Piktochart is a powerful infographic designer with an extensive set of themes, templates, tools, and stock photos.
If you’re looking to build some truly stunning infographics, Piktochart is your best bet. Piktochart offers a massive selection of gorgeous themes that are professionally designed and constantly updated.
Piktochart’s themes are designed to work in presentations, reports, blog posts, and more, and also feature the option to embed interactive elements and video content.
While Piktochart is one of the most sophisticated online infographic makers available, the free version will only give you access to a limited number of themes. To use Piktochart to its full potential, you can give the premium version a shot.
4. Infogram
Infogram is a great tool for creating data-intensive infographics with fully interactive charts and graphs.
With the option to upload data directly from sources like Dropbox, Google Analytics, and Excel spreadsheets, Infogram makes it easy to take huge chunks of data and convert them into readable and visually appealing widgets.
Infogram also lets you embed your charts directly onto your website, giving blog posts an added kick and opening up new ways to interact with your audience through your content.
The full version of Infogram comes with over 200 different templates for building charts and maps, making it a versatile tool for visualizing data.
5. Visme
Visme is a flexible content creator with tools for building infographics, wireframes, interactive web content, and more.
With a wide array of carefully designed templates at your disposal, you can transform Visme’s ready-made themes into gorgeous infographics in a matter of minutes. Visme’s infographic editor is intuitive and streamlined, shaving tons of time off of your design efforts.
From its ability to handle a wide range of other types of content in addition to infographics, including presentations and reports, to its vast library of fonts, themes, and free images, Visme is an indispensable tool for visualizing data and creating better content.
6. Canva
Canva is a robust design app with tons of tools for creating beautiful visual content.
Canva comes pre-packed with a huge supply of layouts, images, filters, and fonts to help you design everything from presentations to infographics to social media images.
While Canva is an incredibly versatile tool, it might not be the best choice for designing data-heavy infographics. With Canva, you won’t be able to generate charts or graphs, so you’ll need to import your own as image files.
If Photoshop seems too complicated, Canva is great for churning out high quality graphics with little time or effort. Canva includes templates for almost every possible scenario and its drag-and-drop interface makes customizing your images simple and straightforward.
Show Your Audience Something Worthwhile
Now that you have the right tools to build your very own infographics, it’s time to start designing unique, engaging, and informative pieces of content for your audience!
Have any questions about designing infographics? Let us know in the comments below!
SOURCE: SHOPIFY BLOGS