Determine your what

- With all content that you create, you should always have an established goal or a set of complementary goals identified at the beginning. This is going to inform the decisions that you make throughout the entire design process. Now, different goals lend themselves to different types of content with infographics accomplishing a number of important tasks but not always the right solution for the goals at hand. For example, when the modern infographic first sprung to popularity in 2009, it was a tool wielded primarily by content marketers looking to produce link worthy content. Marketers would release infographics on a variety of hot button issues with the goal of other online publications picking up the infographic and linking back to the original website that produced the infographic initially. By increasing links back to the website, the site would have more potential to rank higher in Google's search results so they were a link-building play but over the years, infographics have been the go-to solution for a number of targeted goals and these can be broken into a few key buckets. The first being on-site content marketing. This is the production of content within a website to educate and engage those who visit the site with the goal of converting them into a customer or a loyal follower. Off-site content marketing. This is the production of content to live on channels outside of a branded website. For example, LinkedIn and Facebook might be considered social channels. Medium, Forbes, Inc., et cetera, they would be considered publication channels. These are other venues online where a brand's audience might be. By posting content to these channels, the goal is often to engage target audiences to either get them to participate with the brand on that social channel such as following a brand's Facebook page, liking or sharing posts or to get them to leave that channel and visit the brand's website to take action such as signing up for an email list, making a purchase or setting up a meeting and then there's internal communications. More and more these days, we are seeing infographics used for internal communications as well. For example, an HR rep might decide to communicate a company-wide policy or a change to the team with an infographic. Maybe a well-known coffee company who I can't name publicly needed our team at Killer to create quick reference infographics to train their baristas on how to make new drinks or on closing procedures or on how to deal with conflict resolution or maybe a company wants to create a statement wall in their office showcasing their mission, vision and values for all employees to see. These are just some examples of the myriad goals that infographics accomplish but not all goals can be achieved by an infographic. For example, if you want to capture your audience the moment they land on your website, a motion graphic would drive far more success than an infographic. If you want to grow followers on social media, you'll likely see more success with memes and animated GIFs than you would by posting a traditional infographic on a regular basis. This is why it's so important to define your goals upfront. Your goals will help you determine whether or not an infographic is the right solution and they will also inform the remaining four W's. One thing to note before I conclude this lesson, try to stick to one goal for each infographic that you produce. If you must, you can stretch to two goals but often, trying to accomplish too much at once will lead to subpar results. For example, if you wanted to drive traffic to your website and grow social followers at the same time, you'd have a hard time achieving both goals with equal success and one infographic. A single infographic can't easily encourage people to both become a social follower while also clicking through to your website. Instead, you want to have one clear request for action in your infographic. The minute you ask a viewer to do more than one thing is the minute they're going to actually start questioning the validity of your content. We trust brands to deliver great content to us without asking for a lot in return. When that great content comes at too high of a price and yes, asking your audience to do more than one thing is too high of a price, we actually begin to feel taken advantage of and we look at the infographic with skepticism. Today's audiences lack trust in content. Don't risk losing their loyalty by pushing them out of their comfort zone and trying to force more than one goal with your infographics.