Content Marketing Goes Visual
It’s no secret that people love to look at pictures, scan infographics, watch videos, and just generally enjoy all of the visual content that is being produced lately. And why shouldn’t your brand give your audience what they want?
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A Few Tools for Your Marketing Toolbox
There are dozens of resources available, both browser-based and downloadable stand-alone applications, that can help your brand create visualizations, infographics, and other kinds of visually impressive media to accompany your content marketing efforts. We have gathered a list of some of the most useful (in our opinion anyway) of these tools and resources and listed them here for you! We’ve included the name (linked to the tool in question), whether it is free or requires a fee of some kind, and a brief description of what the tool is most frequently used for.
- Piktochart – Offers a free version & a pro version for $29 a month, registration required – Used as an infographic creator
- Easel.ly – Free service, registration required – Used as an infographic creator
- Infogr.am – Free service, registration required – Used as an infographic creator
- Tableu – Free download, email required for download link, Windows only – Used to create graphs, charts, etc.
- Wordle – Free service – Used to create “word clouds”
- Vennage – Monthly service for businesses, starts at $1000 a month – Used as an infographic creator
- iCharts – Offers a free version & 3 premium options for a monthly fee – Used to create graphs, charts, etc.
- Gliffy – Offers a free version & 2 premium options for a monthly or yearly fee – Used to create flowcharts, graphs, and technical graphics
For more information about these and other infographic and visualization creation tools, check out these posts:
- 10 Tools for Creating Infographics and Visualizations – by Miranda.Rensch
- 9 Awesome Powerful Free Infographic Tools – by InfographicsArchive
- 20+ Tools to Create Your Own Infographics – by Kay Tan
- 10 Fun Tools To Easily Make Your Own Infographics – by Katie Lepi
- Data Visualization: 20+ Useful Tools and Resources – by Jake Rocheleau
- Chart and image gallery: 30+ free tools for data visualization and analysis – by Sharon Machlis
As you can see there is a wealth of resources, some free and some for a fee, that can really help you take your content marketing to the next level.
Video: Visual Content Marketing (Webinar)
The Difference Between Infographics & Visualizations
Believe it or not, there is a difference. Marisa Peacock, writing for CMS Wire, describes the difference:
“First of all, infographics and data visualizations are different animals. Infographics are best for visual storytelling and can sum up bite-size amounts of data in a quick, easy, compelling way. They require less time to create, but can be effective. Data visualizations, on the other hand, are useful for showing patterns in data. It requires more from the user as far as data sifting, cleaning and analyzing, but can also tell effective stories.”
Robert Kosara, writing for EagerEyes, describes the difference in words that are very plain and easy to understand:
“What is the key difference between a visualization and a data-based infographic? The visualization is created by a program that can be applied to many datasets, the infographic is hand-crafted for a particular dataset…..Visualization is general, infographics are specific. Visualization is context-free, infographics are context-sensitive. Visualization is (largely) automatic, infographics are hand-crafted. Neither are objective, and both require hand-tuning and understanding to get right.”
By these definitions, one might call something created by a professional graphic designer for a specific brand, covering a specific topic, and using customized visuals to be an infographic. In contrast, a flowchart or graph created in MS PowerPoint would be more of a visualization.
Comments:
What do you think of the difference between infographics and visualizations? Do you agree or disagree with the descriptions provided above?
