World's Best Infographics

If you want some insights into where the content marketing industry may be headed, it might just help to take a look at where it’s been.

As we pointed out when CMI shared its History of Content Marketing infographic in 2012, brands have been telling their stories to audiences for hundreds of years. Not to mention that storytelling itself is one of the oldest forms of communication....

Think back to your first memory: Can you still see the watermelon pink dress you wore? Do you remember the unique checkered pattern of your father's jacket?

Our memories are often linked to visual and sensory elements, while the words spoken or read can be more hazy. That's because our brains have a high capacity for storing visuals in our long-term memory, while text enters our working memory, which is limited. 

This contributes to why infographics and the inclusion of visual content in online information has been so successful. Readers crave visual breaks from the overload of text-based information that floods our daily browsing and work-related activities. 

NeoMam Studios studied how people process visual information, how visuals affect the way we read, and why graphics are so appealing. Discover the science behind why our brains crave infographics....

You were not given a content marketing budget in order to create content. You were given one to increase brand awareness and build your sales and marketing pipelines. Using the Content Marketing Pyramid helps you do just that. (For a deep dive, download Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid eBook.)

The Content Marketing Pyramid enables the development of content and related assets intended to reinforce common messages/themes through multiple content formats, distribution methods, and promotion channels across owned, earned, and paid media.

The Pyramid assures optimal content consumption, reuse, reach and impact. It provides a common strategic process to align different parts of an organization around “content,” ensuring consistency across functional, geographic, and business unit boundaries....

So why are some infographics destined to die in obscurity while others get passed along to every corner of the web?

Content marketing researchers have been burning the midnight oil trying to figure out how to reliably produce viral content. After observing and analyzing a thousand different infographics across multiple industries and platforms, the team at SiegeMedia collected some interesting insights and patterns. As it turns out, going viral isn't entirely up to the hands of fate - the most popular content shared certain key characteristics.

Take a look at the following visual and learn what makes an infographic popular...

Great infoSocial media is an ever-changing beast. You almost can’t have a business in this day and age without a presence in the online world and specifically, at least, one of the big eight social media sites. Gone are the days where only teens frequented MySpace to chat with friends. Social media is here to stay, and people are looking online for your business so you’d better present your best.

From William Faulkner to E.L. James this infographic has the answers.

If you’ve ever wondered how long it took to craft some of history’s most famous books, you’ll want to check out this rad infographic from the kind folks at Printerinks. Tolkien takes top slowpoke honors for taking 16 years to write the Lord of the Rings while the quickest author on the list is John Boyne who wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in only 2.5 days! Check out the entire chart below

If you’re on a business trip to the city of Lausanne in Switzerland, you might have to think twice about drinking an evening beer on your company’s tab in one of the city’s bars. Eyebrows would certainly be raised in accounting at a 33cl beer that costs a whopping $17.60. Situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, the city has the highest beer prices in the world, according to a ranking released by GoEuro.

The website compared the price of local and imported draught beer in hotel bars worldwide to compile their ranking. If you find yourself on a business trip to Lausanne, it might be better to visit one of the city’s supermarkets where a bottle of beer costs only $1.42 on average by comparison.Hong Kong also charges extortionate prices for alcoholic drinks in bars with a 33cl beer coming in at just over $11 on average.

Paris and Zürich follow with beer prices in bars averaging $10.08 and $10.03 respectively. New York is the only US city to make the top 10 of GoEuro’s ranking with a 33cl beer in a bar costing $9.22 on average. Rome and Tel Aviv round off the ten costliest places to drink beer worldwide with both charging just over $9 on average.

There is a massive disparity with the cheapest cities for beer drinkers, the majority of which can be found in Eastern Europe. Bratislava’s bars charge a mere $2.80 on average for a 33cl with Kiev and Cape Town coming second and third for the world’s most affordable brews.

Over the years, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has morphed from a production company free-for-all to an agency shindig to a place where serious people insist that “serious business is actually getting done.”

There is also, thankfully, a lot that remains unserious in Cannes. This is the cradle of cutting edge trends and what-were-they-thinking lapses in judgment. To make sense of what we’ve seen this week, here’s what’s in and out at Cannes 2016. (For easy reference, here’s last year’s list. Remember Periscope?) 

The guys at Brooklyn's Pop Chart Lab's already put out the most comprehensive beer infographic on the planet, but you'd die of alcohol poisoning if you tried to drink your way through it, even in a year. Inspired by the annoyingly repetitive school bus tune, Pop Chart's latest is a lot more manageable. The 99 Bottles of Craft Beer on the Wall chart is a scratch-off checklist of almost 100 craft beers.

When the worlds of content and data meet, infographics are born. That means 2015 was a pretty great year.

At Visually, we don’t believe in wasting time, so we’ve pulled together all the best and brightest infographics in one place. To give the search for the best a little direction, we tried to select infographics that:

-  Use design to succinctly tell a story that images, data, or words couldn’t have conveyed on their ownInclude a narrative that keeps the viewer engaged (as opposed to a list of facts or data points)

-  Require little or no additional context to be understood

-  Create an emotional connection to the information that’s being shared.

Mull over these fine specimens to get fired up for some awesome content creation in 2016. Or if you want to dig deeper, check out the complete list of our staff picks from the Visually Community. You know you want to!...