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You've heard the (now common) saying “content is king”?
Well let’s face it – if content is king it’s a terrible tyrant!
Most of us live in information overload – there’s simply too much content to keep up with, let alone read and absorb. If you’re expending a marathon effort to fight your way through dense, useless or boring content to find that one jewel you’re after … so too is your audience.
Now in financial services our audiences range from consumers, to channel partners and institutions such as asset managers or super funds. It’s stating the obvious to say that all have different information needs – but they also have the same basic need for simplification without having quality content dumbed down.
Hence the rise of the infographic.
With time poverty the universal modern malaise we can now see clear trends on social media – while links to more useful pieces of (text based) information are still shared, there is a huge trend towards sharing visual information instead.
What is visual information?
It is anything that captures information and turns it graphics. Think of animations or the good old bar or pie charts. They are visual methods of conveying complex information. Think of videos and the growing giant that is YouTube. It has much more to it than music videos.
Visual representation enables our audiences (regardless of level of sophistication) to absorb information faster and more easily than they can through the written word.
Hence the popularity of infographics – simply large images that capture detailed information and lay it out in a format that is easy to follow. At a glance they enable us to quickly understand complex information and how it fits together.
What next? The demand for visual information is going to increase as society goes mobile. Images are simply a better communication tool than text for the small screen of your tablet or smartphone.
And so in financial services what better vehicle to get our message across? When we finally get the hang of converting numbers into pictures we’ve got our best ever chance of making sure those diverse audiences are more likely to understand and remember what they see.
In my next post I’ll share some examples of those doing it well in financial services.
