Thinking about creating an infographic? Visual content is more engaging than straight text, and providing helpful information to your audience can be more valuable than an advertisement.

I recently interviewed Danny Ashton, the founder and CEO of NeoMam Studios in Manchester, UK to learn about the best ways to use infographics, the process of creating them and what content is most effective.

Creating a high-quality infographic that achieves your objectives isn’t easy. It usually requires a special mix of storytelling and design skills backed by in-depth research and a clear understanding of the audience.

In this 30-minute interview, Danny teaches me:

• The value of infographics for search engine optimization

• The role of the media in promoting your infographic

• Where his team goes to learn about a client’s audience

• Why you should be building an FAQ if you don’t have one already

• What kind of content is most effective

• The importance of having a narrative

• How a trend toward the “visual article” lets people customize their experience

And it turns out that Danny and I spend our free time in similar ways. You’ll have to listen until the end to find out what we both do to relax.

Links:

NeoMam Studios

Infographic: Why Face Time Will Always Matter

Three Great Examples of Visual Content Marketing

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations

Intro Music stefsax / CC BY 2.5

Outro Music spinningmerkaba / CC BY 3.0

The Transcript

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

Chris Conner: My guest today is Danny Ashton. Danny is the founder and CEO of NeoMam Studios, a visual content agency based in Manchester, UK and they specialize in designing infographics and interactive experiences. Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Ashton: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris: No, it’s my pleasure. So why don’t we start off and just tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Danny: Okay, yeah. So NeoMam was founded three years ago and it came from . . . I used to work within the search engine optimization industry and my job at the time of freelancing after I’d finished my agency time was to kind of create articles or anything that would get out there and get coverage. So I’d want to get picked up by bloggers, shared around the Web because SEOs want links. And that was one aspect of being an SEO that I did enjoy. I certainly wasn’t the best at the other sides and there’ll be plenty of people to back that up. But that part of it, that content, and creating something that people wanted to share was always something that I enjoyed and I was lucky that I was pretty good at it. And it developed and evolved into the agency that we have now.

So I’m really proud of what we’ve done and where we’ve come in our evolution. We’ve got now a team of 18 people. So that’s split between design, promotion, outreach… Yeah, and I think one of the reasons that we started chatting is that we’re seeing the whole content marketing space as a new area for us to go into to really understand clients, more about their business, keep stuff as relevant to their buying cycle and generating the awareness with the content that we do.

So that’s pretty much in a nutshell where I’ve come from and where we are now.

Chris: Great. So we started this conversation and, as I said, your agency focuses a lot on infographics, which is really the topic of what we’re about here today. And I think everybody in my audience knows what an infographic is, but it’s possible for some people, that they might not be as familiar. Can you just outline what that means?

Danny: Yeah, it’s often the hardest question I get when someone asks me what I do and I mention infographics and they have kind of a weird face that they’ve never heard what they are.

You’d think I would get better at explaining it. But in very simple terms, it’s just taking anything – it could be data, it could be information, it could be ideas and visualizing that in a way. And “Infographics” is a term that gets kind of overused and it doesn’t really mean as much as it does now, but it basically means lots of visual content, lots of information in a way that’s easy to digest.

In most cases, what I’ve seen, it’s like what we call the long-form infographics. So these are ones where they fit the browser width and then you scroll and take all the information in as you go through. And they’re pretty much developed just for the online experience. So as broadband and Internet speeds increased, then large images of these size became possible. So this kind of format got used. But we are seeing more and more that an infographic doesn’t have to be something that’s long-form. It can be small, it can be anything that is really taking information or a concept and visualizing it and making it easy for someone to understand.

I think for me, an infographic has to make it easier. If it’s just easy just to read the article, then you’ve made a mistake somewhere down the line. It should be that you get a gist of it within three seconds. Because I’ve talked about this a lot in the content we’ve produced, but our brains are wired for visuals. We understand them kind of pretty much instantly, which in comparison with copy and text, certainly has its place and I’m not here to tell you that it hasn’t. But it does take longer.

So the beauty of an infographic or a visual content is that people can just digest that very quickly. And that’s kind of why they’ve become so popular and everyone’s shared them all in as many places as they have done.

Chris: Nice. So, a little later in this conversation we will talk about the process of what it takes to make an infographic. But can you talk a little bit about how your clients use infographics and what their purpose is?

Danny: Yeah, so it ranges in quite different ways. But in most cases, they’re looking to market their website. So they’re looking to get the word out about what they do. To get brand mentions, get picked up by media publications. A lot of clients will just want the links. From an SEO perspective, the better links that you have, the higher you rank. But we’re definitely seeing more of a shift towards the general marketing of themselves online.

So an example I could give, which is always good to see it in reality, we have a client who’s in the business travel sector. And they really want to speak to an audience who is business travel managers in large companies or PAs or even entrepreneurs who are basically booking the travel for their staff on a regular basis. And certainly when the client first came to us, I thought, “Oh, great, business travel, luxury travel, it’s great. That’d be really interesting to do.” But in reality, this audience doesn’t care about that. They care about getting people from A to B, no stress, as cheap as possible and getting things done like that.

So what this client wanted was an infographic that spoke to these people, so that it would show that the client had thought leadership in understanding what their problems were and what they were going through and hopefully was able to engage with them on a deeper level. But also, it needed to get them featured in that industry press as well, and get some of that traffic back to them. And through the process that we did, we always do some research into finding . . . we know these business travel managers exist, we know they exist somewhere online; we can go and find them. We look at forums, we look in LinkedIn groups. We want to find them talking about the issues that they come across in their job, in their business, whatever’s relevant to the audience we’re speaking to. And through that process, we could see that things like videoconferencing, Skype, all the different things with the technology that’s come in, there’s something that was an issue for these people. It was something that was potentially fearful. Because if your job is to get people on flights or get people on transport and get them to places, things like conferencing potentially have the risk of even taking away their jobs. But we also knew that even just from our own experience, that Skype, or video-conference experiences are never fully perfect. And many of the people, when we saw them talking online, were saying how these were issues and people weren’t thinking about it.

And we ended up coming up with a concept which was why face-to-face matters. And it was an infographic that got all the research of why meeting face-to-face was important and currently can’t be competed with any sort of technology.

And the great thing about this infographic was that yes, it got featured in big players like Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur. But more importantly for the client, it spoke to their core audience and it spoke to them in a way that was supportive of their jobs, supportive of what they do. And when they are in a situation, it might not be now; it might be 6 months, 12 months, 2 years. When they’re thinking about issues that they’re having, especially with support through the campaigns, they’re far more likely to go to them or join their mailing list, to add them on Twitter and all those other interactions.

And I think the way I described it to you the other day as well, is that our infographics or what we produce for our clients is just to get that initial awareness. So these are people who have no idea who this company is and we want to speak to them and get them involved in that long process of turning them into a client or a lead or anything that is a real business objective at the end.

Chris: Right. I like a couple things you said there. First of all, there’s a media element, a getting picked up by the press element of value in these things. And then also, it sounds like there’s a fair amount of research on your part about what your clients’ audience is and the things they care about, which is a general, fundamental content marketing principle. So they’re not talking about booking travel. They’re talking about the value of face-to-face meetings. That’s essentially the conversation that’s going on in the customers of their clients’ heads.

Danny: Completely. Because with any content, and this is in any case, is that if you target everyone, you’re never going to target anyone. And we’re really keen to audience targeting, just from a kind of an efficiency point of view. Our clients really base us on media placements. We do get lots of media and placements, we’ve done well. If we don’t get any, then we’ve not done well.

So our process of the last three years is to get to a point where we know we’re confident that we’re going to get those media placements every single time. And the way that we’ve evolved to do that and one of the most useful ways as well as obviously improving quality, design, everything, all those things. The biggest thing was that audience identification. Because we knew if we could speak to a community in the right way, then we would have success, even if our timing wasn’t right or our timing wasn’t perfect. Our content wasn’t in the exceptional level. Because the truth is that these people weren’t spoken to, weren’t bombarded with marketing messages all the time. And certainly weren’t given the kind of value that we could bring to them through visual, high-end research.

So once we realized that . . . and that’s kind of brought me then, to the world of obviously what you do, which is content marketing, really that whole scale of understanding who clients’ audience is and understanding what they know and using that as a part of the campaign. And to me, it’s really exciting because obviously, I come from a completely different industry and I’ve come this way. But I definitely see the usefulness of it.

Chris: And I’ve learned a little bit here. I mean, I’m learning a lot, of course. My impression is when I think of infographics, I think of person-to-person sharing. So talk about that a little bit with respect to the other side of the equation, which is really getting picked up by the media and letting the media doing the sharing for you. How do those weigh against each other, I guess?

Danny: So I’ve looked at this a few times. There could be two ways of promoting an infographic. One is that you produce it, you know who the audience is and you spend money to advertise and do that kind of person-to-person sharing and hope that enough of those people share it. That it’s going to go beyond that audience subset that you’re targeting with your advertisement.

Now, the problem with an advertisement like that, for content, is it costs a lot of money and it could be into the thousands of dollars, just to get that initial sharing happening and it might not even happen. So it could be that you drop 5k and then nothing really happens and you find out the content wasn’t right. Which is quite risky and something I wouldn’t recommend anyone doing.

Now, the other side of it is to really start at the point of these gatekeepers, which are the journalists, the bloggers, the influencers who have access to this audience. If we can get our content in a way that is relevant to this audience and provides value and isn’t too much of an advert or any kind of process to just sell our client, then these publishers will benefit from that relationship. So they will share that content, because they will get shares. It will satisfy their audience, they will get traffic and all the different things that any publisher is looking for.

And in exchange, we can get access to that audience without paying those large sums of money for advertisement. And the great thing is because we’re working with these publishers on a regular basis, we get their feedback. We know which ones don’t work and we can find out why. Our outreach team, yes, it’s great for getting those initial placements, but it’s also great for knowing why certain things didn’t work.

Anyone who’s a content producer knows that there has to be that constant learning process of why things didn’t work. And I think the difference between the content agencies or the marketers who get it right is that they’re always changing and always adapting so that their end product is powerful to the end user. So that when you do that get pickup, whether it’s, say, Inc. Magazine, then it isn’t just going to stay there. People are going to see it, they’re going to engage it and they’re going to share it further and wider, as if there was that advertising support that was with it.

Chris: I like this. You’re creating content that is valuable for publishers to share with their audience and of course, then it just rolls from there. So how do you get those placements with those . . . how do you publicize what you have for them or how do you pitch that content to them?

Danny: Well, I think another person to speak to is our head of outreach, because she is the expert when it comes to this and she has her whole process. So we have our internal teams here. It’s very similar to kind of old-school PR. It’s all about reaching out to the right people who are relevant to that content.

If we go back to the example of the business travel infographic we talked about, with that, we want to be speaking to really niche industry magazines who are talking about business travel and they do exist. It’s strange when you find out how many different communities exist out there and talk to them in the right way. As well as the larger, more business-focused, they’re a bit more general as well.

And the way that we work is, in a very general way, is we’re always building relationships. So when an infographic works for one client, we cement that relationship so we can use it in the future and also provide and support those relationships. So we help out journalists when they need the help and then they’re also available for us to pitch work to them. Which is always the hardest challenge, is that initial, cold approach. You’re going to have to do it a while before they even start answering your e-mails. And the great thing that we have is our team. We’ve been doing it for three and a bit years. And so our e-mails are recognized, our names are recognized, people are going to open things. Same with any network, any opportunity that you have, really.

Chris: And are there certain types of infographics you find that are particularly effective?

Danny: Yeah. I’m actually working on something at the moment of looking . . . We’re always looking at our ideas that are working well. Because we want to make sure that every idea we come up with is based on a pedigree of what’s worked before. And I think the things that we’re seeing in 2015 that’s working really well is mainly like the how-to, practical value stuff is really powerful. Any content that has an actionable value that the user can get – I call it if they were to go to the effort of printing it out on a printer and putting it up on the wall, that is the ultimate win for us. And certainly, there’s a lot of brands can add to that conversation. There’s always problems that people have and there’s always opportunities then, for you to produce content that fixes or alleviates those problems. And in exchange, you’ll get access to publishers; you’ll get access to audience that will happily share that. So certainly, if someone was just starting out for the first time with infographics, how-to, practical value content would be where I’d start.

Chris: And that’s just content marketing 101 in a sense. You’re trying to do for your clients by providing helpful stuff and the information you provide in an infographic is helpful to somebody else. The how-to is always going to be a winner. And you’re just helping people solve problems and that’s really as good as it gets.

Danny: Completely. And I think one of the things that we’re seeing that’s kind of a trend moving forward . . . and this is, we’ve come out with our new product, which is not particularly new in the grand scheme of things, but we call it the “visual article”, which is, it’s bringing copy and visual assets together. So that yes, you can have the more detailed experience of someone reading it. But also, you have visuals in the same way they work in an infographic, to speed up that processing. And the great thing is that you’ve got lots of opportunities for people to take little bits of it, take what’s right for them, and personalize their experience. And also, they can have the entire infographic as well, if people so want.

So I’ve been kind of looking at how other companies are doing stuff online, and certainly, the core driver of success is not so much the final format or even the design in many respects. The design has to support the content and the idea. I suppose it’s the same with any content marketer and it’s not so much the writer, as long as it’s clear and understandable. But the potential of where it can go is the depth and the concept and the content and the research and everything that goes there. So if it is really deep and it goes really far, then it’s likely to do that when it goes to the promotion stage as well. Because you even just look on the Web today; I’m always looking at stuff to share and everything else like that. And probably 95% of the stuff out there is either purely curated, it’s regurgitated. No new depth. It’s probably someone on average has probably spent maybe three or four hours on a blog post or something like that.

Where the opportunity lies for any of us, is when we go to that next level. So, if we think of our infographic, we’re looking probably about production time of around 60 hours. So if you can imagine, you’ve got 60 hours of investment into that. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s in a form of an infographic or a visual article, you still have to invest that 60-100 hours to get that real powerful reach. And the job of the format, whether it’s the infographic, whether it’s the article, or whether it’s the blog post, is just to make the ease of transfer, so people can understand it easily and quickly in a way that their experience is improved by it.

Chris: Nice. Yeah, it’s all in the value of the content. So what you just talked about is a perfect transition to my next question, which was: what is the process of creating an infographic in terms of how you interact with your clients and what does a client need to bring to you to get started? Because I’m imagining people in the life science industry, for example, they might come to you with a concept and they might come with all the data as well. But it sounds like there’s probably more to it than people are aware of to create a good one. So if you could talk about that.

Danny: Yeah, so I mean it can range from a lot of different ways. It depends what the end goal is. We need to understand what do they want to achieve at the end? But the key thing for us is: Who are they? Who do they want to speak to? And we can range from clients saying, “Look, I know these people buy my product.” Or it can come to clients that say, “Look, I’ve got these personas based. I’ve used them before. These are really critical to us. We know they’re right. We know they’re correct.”

And, obviously, in a perfect world, I’d want to know that exact person. One of the things I really like to do is chat to the salesperson who’s speaking to the customers all the time. I think they can provide some real insight that maybe, other, maybe even management positions just don’t have that. And for us, we really want to get underneath the skin and find out who those people are.

And then, the benefit that we have, we’re an agency and you pay a price for an agency is that we take a lot of that pain away. So creating your own infographic and doing it right is quite a time-consuming process. Our service is all about taking the pain out of that.

So once we do understand who we’re targeting and a little bit more about the audience, the rest of the step, we take away from the client. And the client is just there to provide their support and input and feedback at the different stages. Just because we’ve built that expertise on that area and we also don’t want to turn it into . . . we don’t do the kind of infographics where we’ve got some data and we just want you to visualize it. That’s just really not what we’re set up for. We always recommend you go to a design agency. You’ll probably get it for a quarter of the price, if not less. Save your money, save up and buy infographic from us, I suppose.

But it doesn’t make sense because we’re all about understanding their audience. Doing the real deep research and content and then obviously visualizing that in a way that’s completely different that their audience hasn’t seen before. So that we can achieve those results that the clients are looking for.

Chris: Fantastic. Two things in there stood out for me. One, using personas. So having well-defined personas so you really know who that audience is and what that person’s challenges are that you’re talking to and using the sales team as a resource because they really know, in depth, a lot of times, more about client problems and the things that come up over and over again and probably refine how you present that message very nicely.

Danny: Yeah, completely. And I think that’s a really important area that you can get caught away from the theory and the strategy and actually, the people you are talking to. It doesn’t have to be sales. It can be customer service representatives who just aren’t there and constantly having those questions.

Because even just, if there is an FAQ of the same questions that keep coming up, that can be a goldmine for ideas. Yeah, that’s certainly a future of where we’re looking forward to get better at is to get more in depth with that and I definitely see some of the guys, like yourself, in the content marketing space doing that really well. And I’m always keen to find out a bit more so we can bring a bit more of that within our team.

Chris: Right. I think FAQs are a rich source of content, regardless of how you’re producing them. But certainly for infographics, for blog posts, for all kinds of things. Collecting those is a core piece of work that would provide ample content at multiple stages of the buying cycle, so I like that.

Talk a little bit about how infographics fit in with storytelling.

Danny: Okay, yeah. So we see it as very simple and it’s something that we do naturally and we’ve never really thought about it in many respects. And one of the feedbacks we’ve had from a client is that we have a narrative to everything. And I think that’s just a core of any content you produce.

We’ve been doing it so long now whether it’s been in the written listicle Buzzfeed style, or even to the more intricate kind of interactive experiences that we have. But we think it’s really important that you do have to take the user on that narrative. Even if it’s just simply it’s laying out what’s happening, taking them on the process and bringing them back again. I’m certainly a big fan; again, another area that I’d love to kind of get more involved in is that side of the monomyth, the hero’s journey and really go in depth. I still don’t think quite we’re at that point that that’s required, but it’s certainly the future. I think it was with Slide:ology and I think there’s another great book that talks about how useful that is.

But I think for most of the content we produce, the narrative has to be there. It has to be very clear, straight away. And that’s always, at each stage, we’re looking to do that. Whether it’s through the research, whether it’s through the copywriting itself or even through the design, it has to support that narrative, because that’s the way that we share our experiences to the world and it’s the way we understand experiences. And when you get it right, then you benefit.

But I would say that we probably didn’t come to it from a kind of, “All right, we’re going to narrative, we’re going to do storytelling.” It was more that we wanted to produce content that didn’t suck, I suppose and we produced it. And when it did work then we naturally focused, then, within the kind of narrative storytelling approach. Because anything else, our audience just didn’t engage with it. And I think that’s a core thing that people should look to. Is looking at things when don’t work, and when things do work, and calibrating each time to see how you can improve it, is important.

Chris: Yeah, so measuring these things, going back, figuring out what did, what didn’t. Because I think there’s a lot of shooting and hoping with content.

Danny: Yeah. And it’s a degree of shooting and hoping. We have to start somewhere. And certainly, I’m a big fan of looking at what already works. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. I’m quite honest about this. When we first started, we looked to the best people in the market, which was Column Five. I’ve had chats with the guy a few times, I respect them. I’ve always respected them, and always will do. And certainly when we got out there, they were the guys who were setting the bar. So if we were going to look at anyone, we weren’t going to look at anyone who was a little bit better than us. We wanted to look at the people who were out there. And I think that’s the way you should be doing it and I feel really proud, even though I didn’t used to, when I see other agencies taking some of our ideas, our designs and our style of doing things. You’re seeing that actually now, we’re not copying it anymore. We’re starting to define the space.

And that’s a good thing, and we should all be doing that, because we all get better from learning from everyone else. It’s like I always speak to competitors, I find out what they’re doing, I share what we’re doing, because to be honest, it’s not about having one idea and holding it and not letting anyone know about it. Because certainly, it won’t be that original. But it’s all about how you take stuff on and you adjust it and how you can apply it throughout the whole system is the important thing, I think.

Chris: I love that attitude. There’s a big enough pie for everyone and just raising the bar. And it must be a fantastic feeling to be seen as a leader and now setting the trends and having other people emulate what you do.

Danny: No, completely. And I think we, NeoMam and myself, came to it as just a link-building side of things. We just wanted to create content so we could build links. That was the very essence if you want to call it a mission statement at the start of when we work.

And it’s only through the team and everyone having some great people and learning so many different experiences and really being honest with what was working and what wasn’t working, that stuff just started to change really fast. And it was a real shock to us, really, to see that we were then in that space where we could see that designs were being inspired by what we’d been producing. We could see how our infographics were comparing to what was out there, both in results and both in the look and feel.

And it was just a shock to us that we didn’t plan to go out there and become . . . I don’t come from a design background. If I’m honest with you, I didn’t know what infographics were until maybe four years ago. I came to infographics because it was an evolution, because that’s what people wanted and it was something about visual – the understanding of visual content that worked from a success point of view and it stayed with us and it’s something that we’re going to stay with. Whether we’ll still be creating what we define as like the long-form infographic in a year or two’s time, who knows? But I know that it wouldn’t matter if it’s 5, 10, 15, 50 years, we’d still be creating visual content. Because I know it makes sense. It’s a part of us, we’re wired for it and it helps us to do the important thing, which is the concepts, the idea, the very core of content in a way that people can understand. Everyone can understand, everyone can engage with in the fastest way possible, which is important because that’s what we want to do.

Chris: Right. I love all of that. I love the continuous learning attitude, and so on. And I’m really grateful for all the information you’ve given us today. I want to ask you one question that is not related to infographics and that is what do you do for fun when you’re not making visual content?

Danny: That’s a hard one, that. As anyone will relate to with their own business, the time between working and not working is often . . . it’s often hard to define.

Chris: It’s slim, yes.

Danny: Yeah. No, I think the things that I do like to do, apart from the usual stuff of sitting on the couch and catching up with Netflix, which I’m looking forward to House of Cards, definitely. But yeah, I like to meditate and I also like to get outside into the hills when the weather is permitting. So hiking and riding the bike once in a while.

Chris: Ah, yeah.

Danny: Yeah, just get away from the city for a bit.

Chris: We share all of those in common. Well, it was great having you on the show, I really appreciate it. And I will link to NeoMam in the show notes and I’m sure we’ll put up an infographic for people who are listening, so they can see what we’re talking about and some other links as well that I think will be really helpful. But thank you, Danny Ashton.

Danny: Thank you, Chris. Thank you.