How to use infographics In Legal Content Marketing

If you’re looking for an easy, shareable way of presenting complex content, an infographic might be the way to go.

You already know that content is a valuable asset for your legal marketing strategy but did you know that if you want to stand out amongst your competitors, you need to vary the type of content you create.

Many law firm’s website neglect to include a range of visual content to their site with the understanding their readers prefer only written content. This simply isn’t the case, though.

To stop your website visitors losing interest in your content, add a sense of variety to your blog posts. This will also help you generate more quality backlinks for your legal SEO.

In this post we’re going to look specifically at using infographics as part of your law firm’s wider marketing strategy and provide you with a framework to create appealing infographics that get your audience excited to share.

What are infographics?

The first step is to come to an understanding of what exactly an infographic is. In its simplest terms an infographic is as its name suggests.

A graphical way to present information. In many cases, people, especially law firms, use infographics to present complex ideas or information, or to break down montomous text.

Keating Law Offices uses infographics to explain the 3-foot rule when it comes to cyclists in Illinois

They say a picture is worth 1000 words and this is true of infographics where you’re able to present a wealth of content and data in an easy to understand way.

You can use infographics to present a range of different content. For example, you can show step-by-step guides that show someone the exact process getting from A to B. For many people, looking at a list of statistics or data becomes difficult. Add context to the ideas through images and illustrations.

How to make an infographic and a few tools

When you’ve decided you want to start using infographics in your content marketing you generally have two option when it comes to creation.

You can outsource. This involves finding a designer you’re happy with who can work from a brief. In most cases, you’ll produce the copy (words and data that should be featured on the infographic) and the designer will get to work on putting it altogether to give it the artistic flair you’re looking for. At my agency we do all of that for you.

Second to that, you can create the infographic yourself in-house. If you have a designer on your marketing team, this shouldn’t be a problem, but if you don’t have anyone who can help you design, there are a number of free (and paid) tools you can use to create infographics.

Canva is a free artistic tool used by a plethora of people, even those who perhaps aren’t well versed in design.

There are a range of free templates, fonts and illustration assets to choose from, however, you can also make use of the specialized paid assets too if you so wish.

Piktochart and Infogram are other tools for creating infographics you can check out.

Putting together the content for your infographic

Whether you creating the infographic yourself, or outsource to a designer, you need to put together content that will be featured on it. Data is meaningless without an element of context. This means there is no point writing a numbered list of facts or statistics because without an explanation of why they’re important, they will not mean anything to your audience.

To get a clearer idea of context, figure out the purpose of your infographic. You might be creating an infographic to simplify complex information. You might be creating an infographic to show the such as the difference between a private attorney and a public defender, or perhaps you are showing a step-by-step guide.

The purpose of your infographic will affect which data and information you show. Don’t get bogged down with trying to include every piece of data or statistic you can find. Focus on the narrative. What do you want the infographic to say, and which data best supports your argument. Tell a story.

As you produce more and more infographics, this will become easier.

If you’re writing endless paragraphs, you’re not doing it right. You can of course have very short paragraph explainers at the beginning of each section, but ideally you’re looking for short actionable information that your audience can digest quickly and efficiently.

Legal content marketing infographic best practices

You need to make sure your infographic makes sense and tells a story, especially when it comes to infographics for legal content marketing. Remember, people only share what they find useful or interesting. The best way to work out what this could be is to look at some of the core problems your audience faces. You could send out a questionnaire to your audience, or alternatively, look at the comments on previous blog posts to see what people’s major concerns are. When you know this, you need to start working out how you can create infographics that solve a problem.

Helping Injured has a useful infographic that walks readers through the ins and outs of dog bites, who is likely to get bitten and what illnesses and problems occur as a result of that.

Especially true in the legal industry, spend time checking your facts. You don’t want any inaccuracies that will diminish your appearance to potential clients, it can seriously harm your reputation. Overcome this by including citations and references for each stat you use.

Beginning middle and ends are important in stories as they are in infographics. If your infographic is all about the rise in corporate tax evasion, then you should include data on past tax evasion, present tax evasion and some predictions for the future of corporate tax evasion. This way you have covered how it used to be, how it is now, and how you think it’ll be in the future.

For example, Paul Norris Law is using infographics to explain 4 simple rules of giving a good testimony. Here the readers can quickly and easily digest the information presented.

Don’t forget SEO

It wouldn’t be a legal marketing blog without some mention of SEO. You should be aware that if you just post your infographic to your site without some key components, it won’t get seen by Google or readily linked to.

First you need an introduction and conclusion. You can house your infographic as a blog post, or as a standalone page on your website, but you need to add an element of description to allow Google crawlers to understand what it is they’re looking at.

Second you need alt text. Alt text is a standard field you should consider when adding images to your blog post or websites. And an infographic is no different to a normal image.

When you’ve added these elements, you might find that using infographics increases your search engine reach. When you include a keyword rich file name, as well as a caption and alt text, it helps the image to be found through Google Image search.

People will also share your infographic on social channels, so make that easy by providing share buttons.

Takeaways on making infographics for your law firm

Did you know? 93% of all human communication is visual. Creating infographics is a great way to add some variation to your legal content marketing and are an engaging way to educate your current and potential clients to share your knowledge. It allows you to provide user-friendly information and data that takes seconds to read and digest rather than minutes.

They are a great way to make your content stand out against your competitors and grab the attention of your time-strapped readers.