Ask Amanda About Marketing – Episode 13: Are Infographics Actually Dead? [Ft. Nadya Khoja]

Have you ever seen a truly terrible infographic? I mean, horrific? Gut-wrenching? Like, something that could be on a Geocities site from 2001?

Of course you have. Because when anything proves to be a super effective way to market or communicate, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, but not everyone does a very good job in executing. Which leads people to ask, are infographics no longer effective? Are they perhaps…dead? I talk to the Head of Marketing at Venngage, Nadya Khoja, to explore why infographics work.

This podcast seeks to answer your questions about content marketing and digital PR with straightforward, actionable tips. You can find all episodes here.

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Episode 13: Are Infographics Actually Dead? – Show Notes

This week’s question is:

• 10 Visual Content Marketing Statistics to Know for 2017 [interview of 300 marketers]
• Every Betrayal Ever in Game of Thrones [infographic]
• The Story Behind Venngage’s Explosive Growth [podcast]
• Hogwarts Company Culture [infographic] (By the way, Fractl got Gryffindor!)
• Trumpcare Explained in 14 Visuals [mobile example]

Nadya Khoja, head of marketing at Venngage — a drag-and-drop Photoshop type of service meant to help non-designers create great graphics — spoke with me about the effectiveness of infographics.

To put it simply, infographics are not dead.

Here’s why.

They’re Highly Shareable

They’re a great way for summarizing information and using visuals to enhance that message, Nadya said. Creating infographics encourages you to distill your message, getting to the core of what you’re trying to communicate, and capturing what can represent that information in a very straightforward, skimmable way.

You can also repurpose them much easier, because you can republish them as much as you’d like and they’re easy to share on social media.

Venngage interviewed 300 marketers on how they were using visual content, and when they asked what had the highest amount of engagement, infographics trumped all other visual media.

There is Immense SEO Value

When you’re writing a blog post, you still need to have a study, and the infographic compresses the information in a more digestible way. With this approach, you have the text that search engines can crawl, but you also have a visually engaging element for your readers.

Additionally, being able to repurpose infographics on different platforms and pitch different editors can have a substantial SEO impact from a link building perspective.

Updating content is a great way to repurpose infographics in a newsworthy way, adding even more possibilities for building links.

In fact, Venngage initially boosted their rankings by getting big editorial mentions and links from creative, pop-culture infographics they created.

You Can Outdo the Noise

A lot of people create infographics — no one will deny that. But there are a lot of bad infographics out there. You can make a huge impact on audiences if you’re using content that is complemented by visuals (not just taking an article and adding some graphics to a ton of text) and putting it together in a thoughtful way with audiences in mind.

Creating a good infographic means creating something that hasn’t been done over and over again. If you succeed in featuring new information in a visual way, you can earn great media coverage or a great deal of social shares if you’re properly promoting and targeting the right audiences.

For more great information from Nadya about how they identify their customers’ pain points, how to know who to pitch infographics to, and more, check out the full podcast episode [at the top of this post].

Have a question you want to submit to the podcast?

Email me at [email protected] or comment below!

Have any additional insight on infographics? Post it in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Full Transcript:

Amanda Milligan: Welcome to Ask Amanda About Marketing, a podcast in which I, Amanda, or occasionally a special guest, answer your questions about inbound marketing. Straightforward, right? If you want to submit a question, email me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you. Let’s get right to it.

Nadya Khoja, head of Marketing at Venngage, is joining me for this week’s show. Thanks for being on the show, Nadya.

Nadya Khoja: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

AM: Just before I dive into what we’re going to talk about, do you want to maybe explain your position and talk a little bit about the purpose of Venngage?

NK: Yeah. Sure. So I’m the head of Marketing at Venngage and I joined the team almost three years ago now. We’re an infographic tool. So it’s basically a drag-and-drop Photoshop and it’s meant for non-designers. There a lot of templates that people can come in and just create from so that’s the main purpose of the tool. Since I’ve joined, we’ve grown our team—I think I was the fourth person on the team and now we’re close to 20 people. So yeah, it’s definitely been growing and been doing well.

AM: Yeah, absolutely and because of that experience—the reason I think it’s great that she’s on the show—is because the question we’re addressing this week is: Are infographics dead?

I’ve seen this question pop up a lot on Twitter and on different blog posts, and there’s a lot of debate around it. So I thought Nadya would be the perfect person to talk to about some of the nuances that exist around this whole conversation. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of it, how about we just talked about defining the word “infographic.” It’s used so much that maybe just to start out, we nail down exactly what we’re referring to we talk about infographics. So, how do you or how does Venngage define an infographic?

NK: Yeah. I mean like I feel like a lot of people think that an infographic is some type of complex data visualization, but what it really comes down to is that it’s just a way of summarizing information and then using visuals and using icons and illustrations to enhance that message. A lot of the time, the way we explain infographics is really just taking your content and distilling that core message and identifying what that is.

Then pulling imagery out of that text to help just enhance the overall experience of consuming that information so that when somebody comes to the page and they see an infographic, they can skim it relatively quickly and still understand the whole concept rather than having to read into a lot of very text-heavy material.

AM: Yeah, I guess it completely complements the whole skim-ability factor that even goes into articles if things are graphically demonstrated. So that makes a lot of sense. Do you think that there are any other benefits to using infographics as opposed to you know, doing a standard article or some other kind of vehicle of demonstrating information?

NK: Yeah. I mean, aside from just making the information a little bit easier to digest, they’re a lot more shareable. And you can repurpose them a lot easier than text, right? Because once you create the infographic, you can publish it as many times as possible. So it has very good SEO potential and it’s great for social media as well.

We actually did a survey where we interviewed—I want to say—300 different marketers on how they were using visual content. We weren’t just focusing on infographics. We were actually looking at visual content in general. A lot of the people that said they used visuals—I think there was about 40% of marketers said that 91% to 100% of the content they publish contains some type of visuals. Which I thought was actually very low. I assumed that it would be a lot more people using visuals.

If you look at platforms like even Medium now, they just launched Series, which is this very mobile-friendly tappable visual form of telling stories. And the Medium platform all together is very visually inspiring. The headers stand out a lot, the images pop out when you include them, and it just makes the whole experience of reading content a lot better.

But yes we did this study and despite the fact that very few people said that they used infographics—specifically when they were asked about what was the highest form of engagement for specific visuals—the use of infographics trumped everyone else and this was a pretty recent study. So just the idea that infographics are dead was kind of disproved with this one study that we did.

AM: That’s super interesting. Would you be able to send me the link to that because I’d love to include that in the show notes.

NK: Yeah, definitely.

AM: Awesome, yeah, and I think it’s interesting what you mentioned about the SEO benefit because I think maybe some people would hesitate to have everything on a graphic simply you can’t scrape the text. You often have suggested strategies on how to best present—say, somebody comes and goes to Venngage creates a graphic, to include text with it to enhance the SEO value? Because what you’re saying about social sharing and everything makes total sense. It’s way more shareable. But do you have any suggestions there?

NK: In terms of actually including that content in your post, right?

AM: Right.

NK: Because it’s an image. So in terms of the SEO benefit that I’m talking about with infographics, it’s not so much the text. When you’re writing a piece of content, if you’re writing a blog post, let’s say, I think you still need to have the full article there, like the actual study and the infographic just compresses all of that information into something that’s a little bit easier to skim.

So that way, you have the content for Google to crawl, but then you also have the content for your audience to make it more presentable for them and just an overall better experience. But in terms of SEO, I’m specifically talking about link building with infographics because you can repurpose that content on multiple platforms. It’s a lot easier to use it to pitch different people, to pitch different editors, and get that credit back to your site. But the infographic has to be good. It can’t just be an anything infographic.

AM: It’s kind of scary actually when you Google image search “infographic,” what comes up some of the top examples are things from like, ten years ago. Maybe because I’ve been around for so long, I’m like, oh my God, no wonder why some people—

NK: Yeah, and that’s the thing. It’s the same content that keeps circulating around, right? So if you want to differentiate yourself, one of the best things to do is to conduct your own research and update content and become the new hub of that information.

AM: How would you suggest—so updating infographics like you said, would it basically be a data update? Would it be something like, oh, we launched a survey we’re going to relaunch it again and create a similar infographic? Or are there other ways to do it?

NK: Yeah, totally. We actually just relaunched an infographic that we made last year because it did really well. We did a mind map of all the betrayals that had occurred in the Game of Thrones series.

AM: Oh, I saw that. Yeah, that was amazing.

NK: Yeah, and so it did really well last year and we definitely have gotten a little bit better at the way we strategize our outreach and how we pitch editors now. So we decided to give ourselves a bit more time and relaunch it by adding the season that we missed. So the previous version was Season 1-5 Betrayals, now it’s Season 1-6 because the seventh season is coming out I think next week.

So we started pitching a lot of different editors with this updated version and we already had built a lot of links, like, if you just Google “Game of Thrones infographic,” I think we were like one of the top results. By relaunching it, we were able to pitch a whole new wave of editors that hadn’t picked it up before so they still felt like they were getting the content first and it was still fresh and it was still relevant, but the page itself had already existed on our site for so long.

So this whole new wave of mentions—we got Mashable, Popsugar, CNET, Elite Daily—they all republish this content, right? And that’s a way that you can update stuff. If we had pitched our older infographic, probably no one would have picked it up because it wasn’t relevant anymore. So if you’re looking at data and you’re looking at old data and you want to create your own original infographics, look at the same questions. You don’t even need to make new questions to answer. It’s just a matter of getting the new answers, right?

AM: Yeah, I think there’s so much value there. A lot of the time, evergreen I feel is really focused on, but there’s so much to be said for taking information that’s really timely and then putting in the time later on to update that, to make it relevant again. It’s almost more exciting that way because things inherently will change if you give it that kind of time. So I can see why that’s inherently more interesting to publishers.

So actually, in that vein, I notice on the Venngage blog, you have different types of content. You’re publishing things like the Game of Thrones infographic you just mentioned, which is more pop-culture based, it isn’t directly related to the service that Venngage offers. And then you also have a blog post more along the lines of actually using the tool. I think the last post you have is “How to share infographics to get more views,” right? So, I’d love to hear more about why you take that approach of doing—at Fractl internally, we call it tangential content, meaning that if we produce something for a client that isn’t directly related to their brand mission that we would refer to it as “tangential.” That’s how I would see this Game of Thrones direction would be. So what benefit do you get from taking that approach?

NK: For us, it’s more of a branding play and an SEO play. We know that this content is not going to convert and we know that the people linking to it and the referral traffic that we get from this content is not going to convert. And it doesn’t. But it does get us backlinks and it does get us some brand recognition so that later down the line, if somebody does need an infographic they’re like, oh yeah, I remember that one site Venngage, right?

But the main purpose is for SEO benefit and this is pretty much how we initially boosted our rankings when we first started. It was getting people to link on this content and getting really big editorial mentions out of it. So it has worked out for us really well and yeah, eventually the traffic does come back. Our audience loves it. They get more engaged by what they see us producing and then they get more inspired and want to create their own versions of the same content.

But if you actually look in the Game of Thrones article, we have templates that are similar to what we’ve created. So there is some room for conversion but mostly our users will look at this—our existing users—and then they’ll look deeper into the templates that we offer.

AM: That’s a really interesting way to tie things back to your audience. I think a lot of people overlook that aspect of just re-engaging with people who have already signed on with you and getting them inspired to continue using the tool. That’s a really cool way to do that and it’s interesting to hear that that was such a big boost for your traffic. You know, I’ve seen a lot of people hesitate to go a little more broad with their content. They worry that if it’s not really on brand, it’s not going to be a value for them. Have you seen the brand awareness benefits? I know you said that you’ve gotten a lot of traffic and links from it. But what kind of brand awareness benefits do you think you’ve gotten?

NK: I’ve noticed this more and more frequently as I go to different conferences and talk to people and then they actually tell me, they’re like, oh, yeah, I know Venngage, and it’s always a shock for me. I remember the first conference I went to, nobody knew what I was talking about and now more recently, I’m actually getting more people being like, “Oh, yeah, like I’ve used the tool, I love the tool. I saw this infographic you guys created. That’s why I found out about it .”

A lot of the time it’s not the relevant—the infographic relevant infographics, for lack of a better term. It’s usually these fun pop-culture pieces. I remember we did one on Harry Potter company culture. So we took a bunch of different companies and we sorted them into their Hogwarts houses. That infographic got circulated a lot on LinkedIn and different companies were just sharing it internally, right?

AM: That’s amazing.

NK: I would get a lot of people saying, “Oh, yeah. I have heard of your company. I saw this Harry Potter thing, like it was circulated all throughout our office.” So things like that. So in that sense, it’s not as easy to measure the branding, but I’m starting to notice it a bit more.

AM: That’s always the tough part about branding. I’ve even done a couple of episodes on this because it’s not as easily measurable. It’s written off sometimes but it clearly has really good solid top of the funnel benefit. And also if you have that algorithm about companies being sorted into the different Harry Potter houses, I would have to figure out which house Fractl’s in.

NK: Yeah. There’s actually a quiz. I’ll send you that link.

AM: Yes, I’m gonna nerd out over that later. So Venngage obviously has a big purpose of providing more accessibility to creating these graphics and like you said that survey—I don’t remember when you said it was completed—but that people are using visuals more and more. Do you think that there was an accessibility issue? Maybe people didn’t think that they were good enough to make these graphics or that they have the design flair to make these graphics? How do you think that plays into the way content has been developing?

NK: Yeah, totally and the more we speak with our customers, the more we understand that they are scared. They’re actually nervous to get started on something and one of the main things we’re trying to understand right now is why people don’t complete their infographics once they’ve gotten started.

A lot of the time is that they don’t think—they’re not a designer. They don’t think they have the right skills so they give up. A lot of the time, these are people that start with a blank canvas, right? They start with an empty page and they think okay, I’m going to create something and then they get overwhelmed and they can’t figure it out and then they get scared and then they leave.

But the ones that start with a template where everything’s kind of laid out for you, these are the ones that are usually successful. In terms of lacking that design skill, that’s one of the biggest concerns a lot of people come into the tool telling us. They say that Venngage is their designer and they appreciate the fact that it is so easy to use and it kind of just empowers them to make their own visual creations without having to go to somebody who’s a professional.

AM: Right, so this is a little off the topic of infographics specifically, but do you how do you find out about these pain points that your customers are having? Do you directly survey them? How do you get that insight?

NK: Yeah, we set up phone calls with them and we talked to them for like, half an hour each. The main goal that we’re really trying to identify is: what is the job that they want to be done, right? They already know what an infographic is. Most of the time they find us organically, but we want to know what they’re actually trying to accomplish. What’s the task that they have set out to do?

Everyone comes to the tool because they have something specific they need to accomplish. So that’s been our main focus, and a lot of the time, it does come down to taking that information, summarizing it in an engaging way—taking annoying, boring text, making it more accessible to an audience that might not really understand it. A lot of the time, the successful ones say that they’ve seen a big difference by using infographics rather than just having a lot of content, it helps them stand out from the competition, etc.

AM: That’s really interesting. So do you know about maybe what they’re greater marketing goals are with the infographics? Like it makes sense that just on a basic level, that their content’s just become more engaging. But are they trying to convert? Are they trying to get more brand awareness or build traffic? Do you know anything about the insights there?

NK: Yeah. So a lot of the people that we’ve been talking to you use it for internal communications more so than to build traffic. Then we have some that are marketers that are using it for their knowledge base, right, to just kind of simplify that content so that it helps their it helps educate their users more.

Then, yeah, we have a few that also use it to build traffic. They have content that exists. They want to relaunch that content with something better. So they create an infographic to accompany it and then they pitch that infographic to multiple sites to try and get it featured. It’s sometimes funny because I get pitched with infographics that I can tell were made on Venngage. Like, I think you used our tool to pitch this infographic to me.

AM: That’s great. So in terms of those people who are trying to build traffic and they’re out there trying to pitch these infographics they’re creating. So Nadya was also on Dan’s Shure’s podcast and I’ll link to this episode in the show notes, but in that episode they talk about how Kerry Jones—who also works at Fractl—had mentioned that when our team pitches publishers, they notice that using the word infographic in the subject line was resulting in fewer openings of the emails.

I think that’s what I’d like to talk about next because I think a lot of it is just kind of a semantic issue rather than people don’t want infographics anymore. But when you’re pitching, do you have a specific strategy or something you’ve noticed when you’re pitching publishers about what they think about the word “infographic” or what they’re expecting when you say the word “infographic?”

NK: Yeah, so I think the connotation and the idea around the term “infographic” is starting to get lost and I think part of that is because a lot of people are pitching crappy infographics. I understand because I get these pitches also and I do ignore a lot of them and the content is not interesting. It’s all stuff I’ve seen all the time.

I think that’s a big thing that needs to be noted by a lot of people who are looking to create infographics. An infographic is not just a way of taking the same content that everyone else is already published and just repositioning it as an image. You still need to consider—like if you’re working on a blog post that you know is going to be a big project, that you want to use to get a lot of traffic, that you want to build links to—the way you approach an infographic should be the same way.

It needs to be different and needs to stand out from the rest and it just can’t be garbage. That’s the reason why the Game of Thrones one did so well was because it was new, it was something that hadn’t been done, and it was original research. But we just took that content and we made it more visual. If we had just done the research as an article with no visual whatsoever, the chances of people actually publishing it would have been a lot slimmer I think it’s because it’s easier to look at something and see how the lines connect rather than just having to read through that text again.

So I think approaching the creation still needs to be the same. You still have to focus on making something really great. Not just doing another “10 reasons why you should be on Amazon,” right?

AM: Yeah and I think the fact that aside from that survey you mentioned and just kind of anecdotally knowing that graphics are so much more engaging for content—I mean you have sites like the New York Times that still have entire page is dedicated to the data journalism work they’re doing but it’s all illustrated essentially through infographics or animated infographics or interactive infographics.

It’s obviously still such an effective way of communicating and I think you’re right. I think it just became the way infographics were created—the trend a couple of years ago with the terrible—people just heard that infographics worked and they were just turning anything they can get their hands on into an infographic. They just flooded everything all the content that was out on the internet.

NK: And it’s still like the same text, right? It’s like, you’re taking the blog post and you’re just plastering it onto a canvas and then adding some visuals and hoping that that works out. You’re doing the same thing. Creating a good infographic should be like a cool concept. It shouldn’t be something that’s just been done over and over again.

And the thing is, what it comes down to is still having good content. If your content is that “10 reasons why you should be on Amazon,” no one is sharing that either. So adding an infographic to it isn’t going to change anything, right?

AM: Yeah, and it’s interesting to see because when infographics became “the trendy thing,” whenever that happened a couple years ago, it was always those long infographics you had to scroll through for like entire seconds just to see the whole thing. Which is funny now because that doesn’t even make sense in terms of really digesting what’s going on. If you have to read through a ton of stuff.

NK: Yeah, especially if you’re on mobile, right because a lot of people now—we’ve noticed through our traffic that despite the fact that most of our users are using the tool on desktop, when they consume our content, it’s all on mobile. So what this made us think about was, maybe we should have mobile infographic templates.

So we started creating templates that are just for mobile. So if you’re doing a Series on Medium, I’ll go back to that again. Then it makes it so much easier to digest. This is also from the feedback that we get, because sometimes I’ll pitch these infographics—like the survey for instance—and I’ll pitch it to the right people—we’ll get to that after, I’ll talk to you a little bit about pitching to the correct people—but a lot of the feedback I got was that the text is small and I can’t read it on my phone. Then we started creating these like mobile templates and they’re just a lot more effective, right?

AM: Yeah, that’s super interesting. I was actually thinking about that earlier when you were talking about the survey and people thinking that visual content was more intriguing and captured their attention more. Because so many more people are consuming content on mobile, you would think that people would have the same feeling on their phones or on their tablets as they do on their desktops. Not everybody wants to sit and look at a tiny screen and read a 3000-word article, right? They want to get the point pretty quickly. So you said that making that template has been really effective.

NK: Yeah. Eugene created these templates and I think he did an article on the Trump Administration Healthcare explained in like 14 graphics, and he wanted to test this out on Medium. So he put it as one of the Series and it ended up being an Editor’s Pick. I think part of the reason is that not a lot of people use Series on Medium yet.

The content was so easy to consume because it was just 14 images that gave you the information you needed and he didn’t actually need to really read anything. You could just see the image and you understood what the context was. It ended up working out well, and we haven’t done too much promotion around it just yet. But it looks like people are starting to use them, which is good. It just kind of reinforces that idea that people do want that mobile content.

AM: Yeah and that’s a really interesting perspective to have because I haven’t heard so much about how that’s been performing specifically through mobile. So let’s get back to what you were saying in terms of pitching the right people. From our perspective because we do create graphics for our clients based on usually data-driven information because we found that like, you said, you’re not going to make an infographic about anything. You want it to be something that it makes sense to visualize, like that Game of Thrones connection-type of situation where it doesn’t really make sense to type all that out.

Publishers are still obviously looking for visual content. We stopped using the word “infographic” because we found it has that connotation of what infographics used to be and not how they’ve evolved now into more smaller, data-driven impactful visualizations. So we know now, the better way to semantically pitch infographics, but how do you decide who to pitch infographics to?

NK: One example I’ll give you is—I get a lot of pictures from people with an infographic but the infographic is on a subject that has absolutely no appeal to our audience. It will be like, somebody recently pitched me and the subject line was a question about lung cancer. I was just like, oh my God, like what’s going on? So I open the email and it’s just this infographic about the impact of lung cancer.

I’m like, we’re an infographic tool. We’ve never published anything about lung cancer. This has no relevance to our audience. So this tells me that somebody’s just scraping a list. They’ve typed in “infographic” into Ahrefs or Buzzstream or whatever, they’ve scraped out a list, and they pitched everyone that has ever mentioned infographic on their site before, with an infographic.

But what it always comes down to—it’s not what the format of the content is. It’s what the content is, so I’m not going to go and pitch a Game of Thrones infographic to Marketing Profs. They’re probably not going to use it. So, I looked at people in the past month who have written about the launch of Game of Thrones season seven.

Specifically, only the past month. I’m like, okay, these people are starting to write content that’s getting people pumped up about the new season. They’re probably going to be interested in this so I’ll only pitch these people. I think the open rate I got was like 85% and the reply rate I got was like 40 percent, which is crazy.

I filtered out like a lot of lower Domain Authority sites, I only pitched big editors. The same goes for the marketing statistics that we did. I’m not going to pitch those editors that wrote about Game of Thrones. Just because they published something I created in the past doesn’t mean they’re going to publish this content on marketing statistics or visual marketing statistics.

So I only pitched people who 1) I did a survey with. So I actually surveyed 300 people and then I told them I was going to send them the infographic when it was completed. So most of those people actually published it. Then I went to specific sites that often cover surveys or new information in the marketing industry. So that’s like Hubspot, the Social Media Examiner, Marketing Profs—those guys, right?

So it’s really about like distilling your audience down and knowing the content that they publish frequently and pitching specifically to the editor who’s going to be interested in that topic. So really comes down to doing your research. You can’t just plug in “infographic published in the past five months” and hope for the best. It’s gonna waste time and waste someone else’s time.

AM: Yeah, absolutely and I think this might sound really obvious, but also when you’re pitching different people, even if they’re talking about the subject matter, if they don’t typically publish infographics, they’re always doing text-based articles or videos, it probably isn’t worth pitching them either. It’s good to see what type of content these people are publishing. Are they often fans of interesting visualizations? Odds are they are.

Like we said, it’s the most engaging, but you know, there are some publications that, maybe they talk about Game of Thrones all the time, but it’s just not even the type of content they would be publishing. So yeah, it’s another thing to look at probably. So when you have somebody who’s new to Venngage, anybody who’s talking to you about infographics, and we’ve talked a bit about what—at the at a basic level—makes an infographic interesting compared to other types of content. But what do you think are some of the basic tenets of what makes a good infographic?

NK: We’ve already covered that the content itself needs to be good. but then it’s the way that you lay out the information—the actual design elements of it. And I mean, I’m not a designer so I can’t really talk too much about how to create a great-looking infographic. But I know the basic design tips that I’ve gotten from my designers constantly telling me that the way I’m creating my infographics isn’t awesome.

I guess it’s a matter of not having too much text in it. So don’t just copy and paste an article that you did into the infographic. Find a way to really identify what the core messages and then use verbal imagery to kind of guide how you’re going to pick which icons or illustrations to use. I think I was recently talking to somebody about this, about the example of Little Red Riding Hood.

So I took a passage from Little Red Riding Hood and we cut it back down so that we only got one sentence that summarized that whole passage. In the summarization, I was like, okay think about what images stand out from this. I think it was just like, she’s going on a trip, dangerous woods, red cloak.

Okay, use these to guide how you’re going to enhance this line of text that if I look now at the sentence and I see this image, I already get it without having to read too deeply into the text. I think even though text is on infographics, most of the time you don’t really want to read it. You just kind of want to look at it all together and just get it.

AM: I love that description. Yeah, like taking something that’s quantitative, but still distilling it down to what are the primary visuals we’re talking about here, and what is a symbol or an image that’s going to immediately relate to the topic at hand. Because even if it’s kind of subconsciously, I’m sure it’s helping people understand the message quicker if they’re able to see that Red Cloak. They don’t have to read that. It’s Little Red Riding Hood there. They know that it’s coming.

NK: Yes. They see the forest. They see that there’s like a basket. They see a map. They see her cloak. Okay, looks like she’s going on a trip.

AM: Yeah and even though it’s based on information they’ve done in the past, that just lends itself to understanding it so much more quickly and utilizing that in your messaging.

I can see how that would be really effective. Well great. This was extremely insightful. Thanks so much again. I really appreciate it, and I’ll have a lot of these links in the show notes so that people listening can get a sense of the type of content that Nadya is talking about, the Game of Thrones infographic, some of the other stuff they’re working on so that you can put a little bit of context to our conversation. But thank you so much for being on the show.

NK: Thank you for having me.

AM: Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, click subscribe. Don’t leave me with the realization that I’m talking to no one and please rate and review on iTunes so I can keep making this podcast better and your lives easier. Take care.