Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Big Idea or Enduring Question: How do you add a Flow to the Lightning Record Page? Flow can be run through custom action, Custom button, the flow URL, a Lightning page, a Visualforce page, etc. In this article Add Record … Continue reading →

Advertising can help create a direct connection between consumers and your brand, and is a critical component of marketing.
And inclusive advertising can yield dramatic results and increase brand trust, loyalty, and better overall brand perception. In fact, 64% of people said they are more trusting of brands that represent diversity in ads, and 85% of consumers said they will only consider a brand they trust.
Advertising that works hard for your company has never been more important as we come off the heels of a challenging year affecting all businesses. However, there is one concept that rang true for us all that can inform our approach in advertising for 2021 and beyond – that is, we are all interconnected and interdependent, both as consumers and as advertisers.  
In this post, we’ll provide eight tips curated from Microsoft’s Marketing with Purpose Playbook to help you create more inclusive advertising, reach more customers, and grow your business.

1. Showcase human diversity in your campaigns.
Inclusive advertising means having diversity authentically represented in your ads and promotions, while aligning it to your local market’s composition of diversity. It also means considering the many dimensions of human diversity, including (but not limited to) age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, location, language preference and gender expression.
Additionally, you’ll be able to expand your ability to connect and tailor ad creative and promotions with your audience when you consider experiential diversity like ability, parental status, marital status, military status, affinities, and job function.
Ultimately, inclusive advertising is understanding with empathy who your customers are, representing them accurately, and more importantly, recognizing who you’re excluding in your marketing materials.
2. Perform a landing page and website audit for audience diversity.
Inclusive advertising doesn’t end with the ad. In fact, half of the customer experience with your advertising resides where you send them after they click — which means it’s critical you demonstrate diversity in your landing pages or website, as well.
Considering 64% people are more likely to consider or purchase a product after seeing diversity or inclusion in advertising, it’s critical you ensure your landing pages and website represent true diversity.
Does your website’s collection of photos and images match the audience representation you created across your entire ad campaign? Does each inclusive advertisement point the customer after the click to the landing page that matches the inclusive spirit of the image creative? If not, it should.
However, while it’s relatively easy to spot-check a landing page with the corresponding ad creative, how can you collectively evaluate your entire website for the right amount and variety of diversity?
For an easy way to review what images are across your site’s web pages, simply use Bing.com and type in the search bar the command, “site:” and then add your website’s URL after the colon.
For example, let’s search Bing for the clothing brand Tommy Hilfiger, which looks like this in the search bar: “Site:https://usa.tommyhilfiger.com”. Then, hit “Enter”. Bing will produce a search engine results page indexing all your web pages:

Then click on the “images” in the search engine results page for your “site:” search in the navigation bar:
This will produce all the images found on the website. You can quickly scroll through to get a sense of the diversity — or lack of diversity — in the collection of images on your website.
Your audit can be used as a general website check, or a search for specific dimensions of diversity that you feel are underrepresented in your upcoming advertising campaign.
3. Align your advertising messaging to the nine feelings of inclusion.
Emotions are becoming increasingly linked with brand outcomes. As Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Feeling included so that a person feels that this brand is for me is at the heart of
brand trust, love, and loyalty.

There are actual identified feelings of inclusion in advertising, which can create connection and drive trust. Inclusive advertising can conjure two major feelings: joy, and trust. As a marketer, it’s critical you look for brand connection points in product or features that can create these two main feelings.
However, there is more to it than that – there are actually nine feelings that make up joy and trust, which is great news for advertising. If you can find a genuine and authentic way that your product creates any one of these feelings, this can convey inclusion, which – you guessed it, builds trust, brand love, and loyalty.
This product marketing approach facilitates connections with people, making them feel like part of a community. Here are some marketing ideas to evoke feelings of joy and trust:

Celebration: Of people, their successes, honoring of holidays, etc. How does your product celebrate them?

Zest: For life (for ours, theirs, and that of the planet). Convey enthusiasm and energy. How does your product create a zest for life?

Hope: Bringing hope to conquer challenges and/or societal issues. How does your product give your consumers’ hope?

Relaxation:Instead of portraying the need to be on guard, remove tension or anxiety for your customers. How does your product produce relaxation?

Relief: From concern or worry, removing something distressing or oppressive. How does your product bring relief?

Safety: Create experiences or highlight how your brand extends safety to all people. How does your brand experience make someone feel safe?

Confidence: Instill a sense of confidence—the belief that we strive to act in the right way. How does your product give your consumers’ confidence?

Acceptance: Of others’ differences, typically to be included as part of the group. How does your product make someone feel accepted or demonstrate you are accepting of others?

Clarity: Bring a sense of certainty, clarity, and transparency in ambiguity. How does your product bring clarity to a confusing situation?

4. Incorporate three metaphors of inclusion.
Another customer touchpoint that can help your brand emotionally connect with people in your advertising is language cues and context, which evoke positive feelings.
Discovered in our research, The Psychology of Inclusion and the Effects in Advertising at Microsoft Advertising, we uncovered the following fifty language-based cues that signal inclusion, as well as three metaphors of inclusion which are inextricably tied to emotions.
If used in context and in a genuine and authentic way in your ad copy, website, or digital content marketing, these metaphors can help convey inclusion and drive brand performance.

5. Practice inclusive and authentic image selection.
Authentic representation in advertising is important. It drives trust and brand support — so the images you choose matter. It is worth noting that from the Microsoft Advertising research around trust, we found that there is a strong tie between trust, love, and loyalty.

Once trust is established as the baseline, a brand can begin to build love and loyalty. To do this, brands must go the extra mile to make someone feel understood through inclusion, and that means authentic imagery, too. Inclusion was found to be a key brand attribute that creates loyalty.

The same story threads are woven through our inclusive advertising research. Our research uncovered that authentic representation in advertising builds trust and brand support, with 72% of people saying they’re more likely to support brands with authentic advertising.

Choosing imagery is an important part of the process in constructing a meaningful and inclusive customer experience. Inclusive advertising isn’t just about representing everyone — it’s also about making everyone feel your products or services are for them.
Here are some tips to help identify and select inclusive imagery:
Tips to illustrate “Connection”:

Have more than one person in an image
Include realistic diversity: use authentic and genuine imagery, which is best conveyed using real people being themselves, that reflect everyday life, not actors hired to play a part
Create a visible relationship between people that is positive
Include people in photos rather than featuring the product only

Tips to illustrate “Openness”:

Include people with disabilities
Feature non-traditional dimensions of diversity like people with larger bodies
Include unique subsets of diverse populations
Include multiple people of color
Have people with intersectionality in diversity

Tips to illustrate “Balance”:

Everyone is featured with the same prominence
Equity is conveyed
Ensure multiple dimensions of diversity are represented in an image
Within your campaign, have the creative represent the spectrum of people that your potential customer base could be

Lastly, it’s good practice to include a diverse representation of people in the review of your creative to uncover blind spots, such as non-obvious negative connotations, stereotypes, cultural inaccuracies, or negative associations.
6. Perform an accessibility audit on your ads, content, and landing pages.
Would you want to turn away one in four people from buying your product simply because your ad or website was not in the right format for them?
Conversely, wouldn’t you want to increase your reach by 25%? I hear you saying, “Yes, of course!”
Without accessible advertising, no matter how perfect your product or offer is for someone, one in four people in Europe or the United States might not get your message. This is the ratio of people with disabilities to the general population. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people globally live with disabilities.
Digital inclusion is important because it provides access to services, products, data, information, and education for everyone. We, as advertisers, can recognize these exclusions, solve for them, and make a difference for the one in four people — and also in our business performance.

Download the plug-in for your browser https://accessibilityinsights.io/ and begin to learn how to make your landing pages for your campaigns accessible. This free open-source tool by Microsoft will highlight what accessibility issues are present and how to fix them. It could not be more turn-key, it’s free.
Use the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft 365 to make any media or content more accessible.

Learn the ten accessibility principles to building accessibility into your advertising from the start.

7. Develop an inclusive keyword library.
Nothing replaces the value of first-hand customer experience as you develop an inclusive keyword library for your brand. Begin with customer focus groups with the audience you are trying to reach, and you’ll be surprised what you uncover. You can even start by sourcing this information from your internal Employee Resource Groups.
To develop an inclusive keyword library, you’ll want to consider the consumer decision journey for the product or service you offer. Next, layer on the journey for the consumer with a physical disability, cognitive difference, military status, age consideration, gender expression, or other dimensions of diversity.
Include their lived experience and map the unique keywords that they might use to seek out your product. By understanding the consumer decision journey from their perspective, you will develop your own inclusive keyword strategy for your business.
One simple example is understanding gender differences. In Microsoft Advertising’s Inclusive Automotive Marketing webcast, we shared the difference between men and women in the consumer decision journey when shopping for a car. An inclusive keyword strategy can inform not only your search engine marketing (SEM) but could shape you content marketing, as well.
As suggested earlier, don’t stop at the usual dimensions of diversity — go further and see what you can uncover to help you connect and give people the feeling that you’re “a brand for someone like me.”
8. Root out bias in your ads and your data.
Contending with and working towards eliminating bias applies to all of us. As marketers, our job is to understand and identify potential bias that can live within our datasets and our marketing models. Bias in data produces biased models, which can be discriminatory and harmful. Bias can lead to missed opportunities in marketing, or even damage your brand’s reputation.
There is a long list of bias types, and it’s good to become familiar with many of these. A great resource is the Harvard Implicit Bias Tests, which you can use to explore and learn about the variety of biases.
For instance, a marketer might conclude that a luxury accessories brand should target women, because gender appears to correlate with a higher purchase probability. You might assume that only women buy luxury handbags. However, gender may just be a red herring. Income could correlate to a much higher degree with conversion.
The resulting bias of only targeting women, then, would limit your opportunity. I invite you to have deliberate curiosity about long-held beliefs, because you might be accidentally leaving out other buyer personas.
Additionally, it’s critical you’re cognizant of gender-neutral pronouns in your marketing materials. Refer to “they” or “them” when writing about people (rather than “he” or “she”), and ensure you offer at least a third option when asking for gender in customer profile forms.
As we start 2021 and work to find new ways to drive business impact while making a positive impact in the world, we hope these eight tips for inclusive advertising help get you there. Let’s work together to build a more inclusive world today.

It’s hard to believe that if the HubSpot Blog were a person, it would currently be in high school.
That’s right – for well over a decade, content has been published on the HubSpot Blog to help hundreds of millions of readers discover best practices in the areas of marketing, sales, customer service, website development, agency work, and general business best practices.
Behind the scenes, our team also thinks about how we can convince as many readers as possible to become leads and access more information, tools, and resources from HubSpot – and anyone who has worked on lead generation knows that accomplishing this task is much easier said than done.
Effective blog lead generation requires both creative and analytical skills. It’s about knowing what numbers to crunch, how to analyze your existing data, and how to make projections based off of traffic, monthly search volume, and conversion potential.
Additionally, any good marketer needs to understand the human aspect behind this process and not lose sight of the people reading your blog and the problems your business can help them solve.
Over the years, the team at HubSpot has landed on a process that continuously generates leads day-after-day, with a reliable blog view-to-lead conversion rate and a steady flow of traffic.
Here are the steps my team at HubSpot takes to generate leads from our blog.

1. Audit existing blog metrics.
To develop a process for growing our blog lead number, we first needed an understanding of how well we were performing.
To capture the current state of blog lead generation, we looked for the overall traffic number and number of leads generated from the blog. These two numbers gave us a baseline conversion rate (in this case, number of leads generated, divided by the total views to the HubSpot Blog in a given time period) from which we knew the team could only go up.
While the number of leads was the ultimate goal for our team, we wanted to take a deeper look at the overall conversion rate and how it changed month-over-month – this number would let us know for sure if we were growing traffic to posts and topics that were most likely to convert their intended audiences.
The big-picture conversion rate gave us an important directional view, but if we ever saw a major shift in that conversion rate, we needed to know where that shift was happening. For example, if we saw a surge in traffic to a low-converting post, that would hinder the overall conversion rate for the blog.
To drill down further, we also looked at all of our post-level data – that is, each post’s traffic number, number of leads generated, and CVR. By exporting and tracking this data monthly, we were able to see which posts were dragging down our CVR, which posts were keeping it strong, and which posts were prime candidates for a better CVR.
How to complete this step:

Choose a time period (last quarter, last month, etc.) for which you want to know your conversion metrics.
Determine your overall data for traffic and leads generated in this time and calculate overall blog CVR.
Export your traffic and lead numbers for individual blog posts for this time period. Depending on your analytics tool, this may require you to export data from two different sources and combine metrics using a VLOOKUP on Excel or Google Sheets.
For each post, divide the number of leads it generated by its traffic number to get post-level conversion metrics.

2. Group common posts together.
Over the years, HubSpot has published thousands of blog posts – and while this was immensely helpful for growing HubSpot’s email subscription base and ranking for countless keywords, it made the process of organizing and analyzing conversion metrics extremely difficult.
Luckily, the blog and SEO teams developed a model to group posts with similar search intent with the pillar-cluster model. In a nutshell, this model was the result of a massive audit to better organize our blog, reduce redundancy on the blog, and help search engines understand which pieces of content we wanted to be considered the most authoritative on a given subject.
As a result of this project, all of our blog posts were given a relevant “topic tag” – or the cluster for which each post belonged. For instance, any Instagram post is assigned an “Instagram Marketing” tag, and links back to our Instagram Marketing pillar page.
This process ensures effectiveness when analyzing metrics. For instance, when exporting blog metrics, we can analyze blog posts by tag (i.e. all “Instagram Marketing” posts), of which we have a few hundred — rather than analyzing each individual URL, of which we have over 10,000.
How to complete this step:

Export all of your blog posts from your CMS or website analytics tool onto a spreadsheet.
Categorize each of your keywords into a topic cluster. These topic clusters should be high in search volume, anchored by a long and high-trafficked post, and related to each other when it comes to search intent. For example, rather than put all of our posts on social media in one giant “Social Media” cluster, we created more niche clusters for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to help us categorize with more specificity.
With each post properly categorized, organize your data with a pivot table to look at the numbers generated by each cluster rather than each URL. Your pivot table should include the number of posts in each cluster, the views generated, and the leads generated. From there, you can calculate the cluster’s CVR by dividing total leads by total views.

3. Determine the best content offer opportunities.
One of the major benefits of grouping your posts together is identifying a content offer opportunity that can be effectively promoted on multiple blog posts, as opposed to an individual post.

As acquisition marketers, it’s tempting for us to attempt optimizing the conversion paths for high-traffic posts. However, these high-traffic posts are oftentimes too general and unrelated to what it is we’re trying to market.

This mismatch results in misplaced efforts and unmet lead goals, as we’re quick to ignore blog posts which – on their own – may have lower traffic numbers, but together have a substantial traffic number.
Ask yourself – which of these two options is a better pursuit for lead generation?

A blog post that has little or nothing to do with your products or services, but is viewed 100,000 times a year.
10 individual blog posts that have a clear connection to your company’s core competencies, but on average generate only 10,000 views each per year.

In either scenario, you’d be optimizing the conversion path for 100,000 readers – it’s only by grouping these posts together that you’d realize option #2 is a much better option for lead generation.
To address this issue, we organized all of our blog topics by the potential number of leads they could generate, but readily discounted any topic cluster of which we doubted the conversion potential. This crucial step ensured we only considered ideas that we believed would be worth our time and resources to create.
Along with dedicated CTAs for each blog post we create, we also create featured resources for certain topics we believe have high conversion potential. For instance, in this Ebook Format blog post, we created a special featured resource, 18 Free Ebook Formatting & Creation Templates:

How to complete this step:

Calculate how many leads each topic cluster could be generating. At HubSpot, we do this by subtracting each cluster’s actual CVR from its target CVR, and multiplying that difference by the traffic number for the desired time period.
Organize data by each cluster’s lead generation opportunity – looking first at the highest opportunity and at the lowest opportunity last.
Work through your list of high-opportunity clusters and remove any low-intent clusters from your consideration, ensuring you’re only left with topic clusters that have a direct connection to your products/services.
Select one (or many) topic clusters which you want to support with a lead-generating content offer.

4. Create lead-generating content.
By this point, you’ve identified topic clusters which you feel would benefit from a new, dedicated piece of lead generating content. Now, it’s time to create that piece of content.
Understanding what kind of content to create comes from knowledge of your industry, your market, and your buyer personas. In our experience, we discovered HubSpot’s Blog audience responds to actionable, personalized, and customizable content in the form of templates, tools, and kits.
However, this is not the case for all organizations – so figure out which content format works best for your audience by auditing the performance of your current library or testing out different formats to see what resonates with your blog readers.
With the knowledge of what formats work best for our readership, we got to work on creating templates for our most-read but lowest-converting clusters, so that readers would see our content as an actionable next step for them to apply the knowledge they gained in the blog post. Below are a few examples of how we mapped an offer to a topic cluster.

Blog Topic Cluster
Content Offer

Customer Experience
Customer Journey Map Templates

Sales Training
New Hire Sales Onboarding Template

Product Marketing
Product Go-to-Market Kit

Pricing Strategy
Sales Pricing Strategy Calculator

Facebook Advertising
Facebook Advertising Checklist

The most important thing to remember during this step is to not overcomplicate your content. Remember, to secure a conversion, you need to convince a reader of your content’s quality and relevance. If you’re struggling to make the connection between your blog content and your offer’s content yourself, how well do you think a reader skimming your blog posts will make that connection?
How to complete this step:

Look through the posts in the topic cluster you want to optimize with new content and think about what a natural next step would be for the reader.
Cement an idea for a piece of content you can create that aids your readers in that next step.
Create the content in your desired format (PDF for ebooks, Google Sheets or Microsoft Word for templates, etc.) and launch it behind a lead-generating form on your website.

5. Promote content with CTAs.
To facilitate a blog conversion, you’ll need to let blog readers know about the new lead-generating piece of content on the same page as your blog content.
Blog CTAs can take a variety of formats. Two of the most popular are:

Anchor Text CTAs – Hyperlinked text to the landing page of the offer you’re promoting. Remember to keep anchor text direct and clear so readers know what they’re clicking – action words like “download” and “access” are useful here.

Image CTAs – Hyperlinked images to your offer’s landing page. These CTAs might look like a banner ad and contain an image of the offer alongside copy explaining the value of it. These image CTAs could also be an image of the offer itself, which makes sense if promoting a template or a tool.

At HubSpot, the majority of our posts contain at least three CTAs – one anchor text, and two image. Depending on the intent we expect readers have on a specific post, we may include several more. However, all of these decisions are based on years of data collection and A/B testing – which we encourage you to rely on as well to ensure a non-intrusive CTA experience on your blog posts.
How to complete this step:

Determine the CTA types you want to include for the blog posts you’re optimizing.
If necessary, create CTA imagery with a design tool like Adobe or Canva.
Add CTAs to each post, either by utilizing a CTA tool or hyperlinking each image or line of text you add into your blog posts. We recommend the former.

6. Analyze your results.
We gained confidence that this approach worked best for us when the results confirmed so.
After 30 days of launching a new content offer on a series of blog posts, we always answer two questions:

How many leads did each blog generate before we optimized it with the new content offer?
How many leads did each blog generate after we optimized it with the new content offer?

Far more often than not, these clusters see a notable increase in CVR, with some increasing by more than 1,000%.
However, there have been times where we missed the mark and the offer did not perform as expected. When that was the case, we reverted the changes and went back to the drawing board – equipped with the knowledge of what didn’t work, which helped us determine what would help us generate more leads in the future.
How to complete this step:

Calculate the traffic, lead, and CVR numbers for each blog post optimized with the new offer before swapping out the CTA.
Calculate the same for a set time period after the CTAs were swapped.
Calculate the difference in leads and in CVR for each post.
If the post did not increase in CVR as expected, consider reverting your changes and creating a new content offer.

7. Align with SEO.
When we discovered that this process was helping us hit our goals, our immediate thought was protection. HubSpot writers and SEOs work hard to ensure our blog posts continuously rank on the first page for the search results of their intended keywords — and we don’t want to lose that hard-fought real estate.
However, like all teams, SEO needs to prioritize which blog posts are most in need of protection from losing their SERP rankings and traffic – so it became our job to ensure HubSpot’s SEO team knew which posts were most important when it came to generating leads.
We’re fortunate here at HubSpot to work with expert SEOs who are able to quickly and effectively prioritize the right content.

As my colleague Braden Becker – HubSpot Senior SEO Strategist – said when we spoke about this topic at INBOUND 2020, “Traffic doesn’t pay the bills.”

Once we were all on-board regarding prioritization, our teams came to an agreement on how to best manage an SEO strategy for high lead-drivers while respecting the importance of maintaining high traffic numbers for posts across the HubSpot Blog.
The team takes the following steps to ensure lead generation goals are met:

Protect the traffic to high-traffic, high-converting blog posts by regularly checking performance and making as-needed updates to the content of these posts. By frequently optimizing these posts, we let search engines know we’re quick to add the most relevant information onto these pages.

Grow the traffic to low-traffic, high-converting blog posts – or ensure that these posts have maxed out their organic traffic potential.

Create posts for keywords that we have not written articles for – but align with related content offers or clusters – as these posts could generate substantial lead numbers for us. This step requires keyword research to ensure these new posts generate traffic.

Stop protecting traffic to high-traffic, low-converting posts. While strong traffic numbers are great, we came to the conclusion that a lower traffic number is acceptable if it means redirecting our historical optimization efforts away from posts that might not generate as much traffic, but will generate significantly more leads than other posts.

How to complete this step:

Come up with a list of blog content that you’d like to see an increase or decrease of traffic to for lead-generation purposes.
Present this list to your colleague(s) in SEO to determine what work can be done to redirect traffic growth efforts to the right posts. Note: it’s important to set expectations here, as an SEO cannot wave a magic wand and increase demand for a low-ranking keyword. Sometimes, a post is ranking as well as it can be – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t double check to see if there’s opportunity to grow traffic where possible.

Present a list of high-traffic, high-converting blog content to see if there are similar keywords which could be written about in a new (or updated) blog post, in addition to potential keywords that could be the basis for net new posts.
Come with data. SEOs aren’t in the business of risk-taking, so explain how a sacrifice of traffic in some areas could result in a stronger CVR and higher lead number from your company’s blog.

8. Repeat the cycle!
HubSpot’s bloggers are always creating new blog posts and historically optimizing existing ones. In other words, my team is always presented with opportunities to create new lead-generating content and ensure the content we’ve already made still holds up and is of value to our leads.
Whenever we create a piece of gated content, we always follow the seven steps above, and we’re consistently rewarded with an increase in leads from our blog.

In this article, you will learn everything about data driven marketing from definitions and examples to best practices and how it influences marketing automation and personalization.

Have you ever wished you could just use a picture to explain a process instead of words (or your hands)?
A process infographic could be just what you need to show your audience how to do something or how a process works. A well-designed one can establish you as an authority on whatever subject you choose to cover — whether you’re trying to show how your business’s coffee is sourced or train the new hire remotely.
Even better, they’re easy to create using a template or from scratch, meaning you can get started on one today.

What is a process infographic?
A process infographic simplifies and explains the steps of a process in primarily visual terms. Generally, it illustrates what happens during each step or phase with an intuitive layout that’s easy for the viewer to follow from start to finish. A well-designed process infographic makes the concept you want to share more accessible and saves you and the audience time.
Chances are, you encounter process infographics in some form pretty regularly in your daily life. Just imagine how much (more) complicated it would be to build your new Ikea desk if the instructions only included words and no visuals. Pretty daunting, huh?
Process infographics allow us to visualize how a process works more quickly and with more clarity. This makes them excellent training and educational tools — but also a smart marketing strategy.
Here’s an example of a process infographic that explains mechanical recycling:

Image Source: bluevision
For marketers — particularly those of us who are trying to market products or services that require a bit of explanation — process infographics are extremely helpful for connecting with potential leads and communicating your company’s value. Explaining how your company’s offerings can provide value to customers with visuals can make your marketing materials more memorable and impactful than using copy alone.
Where to Find Process Infographic Templates
If you want to create your own process infographic with a template, here are a few offerings for every budget.
Venngage
Venngage has a wide variety of process-specific infographic templates for a number of different purposes. If you’re looking to essentially plug your process into a finalized design and go, you’ll likely find what you want on Venngage. Monthly and annual subscriptions are available that give you full access to their template library and the ability to create and download your own process infographics.

Template available on Venngage
Canva
Canva has ready-made infographic process templates ideal for fun activities, recipes, and the occasional life hack. You can also create a blank infographic process template on the site if you can’t find one that fits your project. Canva has a free and paid version depending on your needs.

Template available on Canva
Visme
Visme’s library of process-specific templates includes an extensive variety of different options, including more flowchart-style process templates than other infographic builder sites. If you’re looking to translate a particularly complex process into a visual medium, Visme is a smart place to start your search for the perfect template. You can set up an account for free or get access to the full library as a premium member.

Template available on Visme
HubSpot
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that HubSpot offers free infographic templates, including a number of process-specific templates that are easy to customize. All of our templates are free to use and compatible with PowerPoint, so you don’t need to download any new programs or apps to use them.

Template available from HubSpot
DesignCap
DesignCap is an online graphic design tool with a curated selection of process infographic templates available to customize to your needs. While their selection is technically smaller than other template tools on this list, every template was created by a professional designer. They offer many templates for free and have paid plans starting at $4.99/month.

Template available on DesignCap

How to Create a Process Infographic Without a Template
If you can’t find a process infographic template that fits the process you want to visualize, you can always create your own from scratch.
For the mechanics of conceptualizing, structuring, and creating a cohesive design for your infographic, you can check out our step-by-step blog post here to develop your own infographic design in PowerPoint. Below, we’ll chat through a few tips specific to process infographics you can apply to any design.
Pick one process to explain.
Process infographics are good at breaking down complex subjects, but you still want to limit the scope of your design to one single topic that can be explained in a linear way — i.e., things that have a start and an end. Trying to explain too much in one visual can make your design confusing. Stick to one central idea per infographic.
Speak to your audience, not yourself.
This applies to most marketing strategies, but it’s always important to remember that you are — more often than not — not your target audience. Chances are, you know a lot more about the subject of your infographic than your audience, so it’s easy to fall back on that knowledge as you plan your design.
Because your audience knows less than you do about this subject, it’s important to approach any complexity from their perspective, taking the time to explain more elements than you would need yourself.
Map out each step with a clear start and end.
As you start outlining your infographic, identify where your audience will start (what they likely know about the process before reading the infographic) and where you want them to end (what you want them to know by the end). With those specifics in mind, map out the steps of
Experiment with the layout.
What’s the best way to structure the information of your process infographic? This will ultimately depend on the “shape” of your information.
For example, a supply chain infographic will likely benefit from a straightforward, linear way of displaying information, but a process like how your company recommends specific products for different needs would need more of a flowchart style design. Experiment with different ways to lay out each step of the process you’re describing until you find one that makes sense.
Edit for clarity.
Once you have a draft of your process infographic completed, give it a re-read and check for areas that might be unclear or confusing. Or even better, ask someone else to review your work with a fresh pair of eyes.
Don’t skip this final review — the goal of your infographic is to make something complex more accessible, and not everyone learns new information in the same way. Having someone else take a quick look can help you refine your infographic so it suits a wider audience.
Visuals succeed where words can fail.
We’ve avoided using this particularly relevant cliche for this entire article, but here it comes: a picture really is worth a thousand words. Using visuals to aid in your explanations of complex subjects or processes can help make your marketing materials more accessible and human.
The next time you’re tasked with breaking down a subject that seems to resist clear explanations, consider making a process infographic instead.