Motion Infographics for Stakeholder Engagement: A Content-Marketing Perspective

Introduction

Infographics have become a valuable instrument in clarifying concepts, distributing information, and promoting awareness (Adi & Setiautami, 2021; Mansour, 2021). Based on data visualization techniques, infographics integrate images, illustrations, charts, text, and other elements in a consolidated presentation to visualize a specific topic and present it to the audience (Ismaeel & Al Mulhim, 2021).

Primarily used in an explanatory way, infographics are traditionally designed, developed, and distributed in a static format. The recent advancement in technologies has made it possible to animate various components of infographics (Wang et al., 2021). Besides, the audiences have become increasingly sophisticated, demanding more engaging, appealing formats of digital content. Therefore, incorporating motions in infographics as a new dimension has become an inevitable trend in design considerations of infographics (Doukianou, Daylamani-Zad, & O’Loingsigh, 2021).

Infographics have been applied in marketing settings to help effectively develop the content and deliver it to the relevant recipients (Siricharoen, 2013). In particular, infographics prove to be a powerful tool for content marketing (Gamble, 2016). Digital content in content marketing exhibits the following major characteristics: “information recombination, accessibility, navigation interaction, speed, and essentially zero cost” (Koiso-Kanttila, 2004). Infographics techniques enrich these characteristics to facilitate the design of digital content and its presentation to the stakeholders, enhancing the efficacy of content marketing (Dalton & Design, 2014). Adding motions to infographics further improves the efficiency of content marketing, as animated content can grab the stakeholders’ attention and improve their engagement (Baxter, Lonsdale, & Westland, 2021).

Stakeholder engagement, an important area that originated from project management (Pedrini & Ferri, 2019), has seen its critical values in many different contexts, such as corporate social responsibility (O’Riordan & Fairbrass, 2014), supply chain management (Camilleri, 2017), and sustainability (Perrini & Tencati, 2006). Stakeholders are people that are related to organizations in terms of their various responsibilities and rights, such as employees, customers, suppliers, business partners, shareholders, sponsors, government agencies, and beyond (Aksoy et al., 2021). Content marketing supports stakeholder engagement through a process that includes a series of activities such as content planning, creation, optimization, distribution, measurement, and repurposing (Naseri & Noruzi, 2018).

Although infographics play an important role in content marketing for stakeholder engagement, very few studies have explored the mutual interactive connections between infographics, content marketing, and stakeholder engagement. There lacks a holistic framework to systemize the content marketing activities to engage different types of stakeholders with the help of infographics. Furthermore, the role of the animated features of motion infographics in stakeholder engagement needs to be investigated from a content marketing perspective.

This chapter proposes to fill the research gap by developing a design framework of motion infographics to engage stakeholders from the perspective of content marketing. Specifically, we synthesize and illustrate the specific steps and considerations to strengthen the role of motion infographics in facilitating content marketing and promoting stakeholder engagement. Through this work, we hope to advance future research in the multidisciplinary area between motion infographics, content marketing, and stakeholder engagement. This research also provides valuable guidelines for practitioners to design and implement motion infographics in these relevant contexts.