The ultimate cheat sheet for creating infographics for your small business

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You’ve heard the saying a picture paints a thousand words, haven’t you? Well, it couldn’t be truer today. We live in a world where many things are vying for our attention. When it comes to marketing your small business, you need to be able to cut through the noise.

Infographics are a great way to do that. They help to display complex information in an easy-to-understand way and will help your business stand out. So, I’m going to show you how I created the infographic in this blog post.

How can you create your own infographics?

It boils down to two ways:

• Get someone to do it for you.
• Do it yourself!

If you pick someone to do it for you, find a good graphic designer by asking for recommendations. I’d recommend asking for 2-3 quotes, so know exactly what you want. Also, make sure you ask to see some of their previous work, so you can judge their design skills. The best graphic designers will have their previous work on their websites, so have a nosy before you hire one.

If you decide you want to do it yourself, there are any number of tools you can use. I’ve picked two to talk about:

Hubspot: they provide free templates that have been created in PowerPoint. That means there’s no design package to learn. All are easy to customise with your brand colours, and you can add your logo and website. If you’re just getting started, this is a great way to create your own. All you need is the information you want to present!

Piktochart: this is an easy-to-use infographic maker. They also provide free templates (there is a paid level) that you can use to create your own infographics. You can apply your own brand colours, include your logo, website details and more. What I love about this is that you can use images in the infographics, rather than just icons. I think that makes the infographics a bit more interesting.

Learn how to make your own infographics

The Hubspot templates are pretty straightforward. Whilst Piktochart is too, I thought I’d break down how to create an infographic here. So, here’s my step-by-step guide.

1.  Choose your template

When you choose the Create now button, you’ll be asked what you want to create. Choose ‘infographic’, which will lead you to the templates. If you’ve paid, you can choose from the PRO templates, but I’ve found that the free ones are as much as I need. Pick the type of template you want to use and you’re ready to get started!

2.  Start applying your brand colours

The first thing you should think about is how you want to customise the template by adding your brand colours. This is really simple to do. Just select the background menu on the left. Then click in the section you want to change. Enter the hex code for your chosen colour and press enter on your keyboard.

3.  Start adding your information

You’re ready to start adding information to your infographic. Just click on the text you want to change. You’ll see a box appear around it and you can click on it and swap out your own text.

4.  Add your own images

Piktochart comes with a library of images you can choose from if the ones in the template you’ve chosen aren’t appropriate. You can also upload your own images to use (just make sure you’re not infringing any copyrights!) Just click on an image box and drag and drop your selected image into the box.

5.  Add your information to the footer

The last thing you need to do is add your information to the footer. I would recommend adding your logo (just upload it and follow the steps for adding images) and also your website at a minimum. You can also add icons for the social networks you use. If you used statistics you found through research, this is the place to put your sources.

And, hey presto, your infographic is ready to download. At this point, I would recommend stepping away from it and then proofreading it with a fresh pair of eyes. Piktochart lets you save your work, so you can come back to it later. Make sure there are no mistakes.

6.  You’re ready to get your infographic

Once you’re ready, just hit the download button. Here’s where the magic happens! You have two options when you download. You can download the whole infographic, or you can download blocks. I recommend doing both.

What to do with your finished infographic

I would recommend you embed your infographic in a blog post, just like I did. Now you have a resource on your website that you can direct people to. Remember I said you should download the infographic in blocks? Well, they’re great to use on social media as small snippets of your infographic. Make sure you add a link to your blog post where people can view the whole thing.

And that’s it. Creating an infographic is relatively simple once you know how. They are a great way to present information that might be too complex to write down and also brilliant to add a bit of interest to things like statistics and lists. I’d love to see what you create, so why not get started on yours today?

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