Using Piktochart: a marketing technology review

A friend alerted me to Piktochart, the online Infographics creator so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s my first impression after making two infographics, the one you see above (which took about 7 minutes) and a spoof Content Marketing Strategy infographic I cranked out last week and shared on Pinterest (yes, it did get shared as a real infographic).

What is Piktochart?
It’s a quick and easy way for non-designers to create and share infographics.

Why would you use it?
If you have an idea and a handful of data points – but you don’t have the time or budget to do a proper infographic, you could use Piktochart to get something credible to market quickly.

How does it work?
Pick a theme – there are four to choose from in the free version, more in the Premium version:

You can then change the ‘Mood’ using pre-made colour palettes and start editing the text, icons and images using pretty simple drag & drop editing tools.

You can then export your work as a PNG file, as raw data or as HTML (Premium only). Ready to drop in your blog post and share away as usual.

Pros

• Very easy for non-designers to get something basic created
• Fast & free

Cons

• You tend to make something that looks like every other infographic out there — and most of these are poor
• It’s harder to go off-piste and customise – InDesign is obviously much better for proper design
• Sharing isn’t built in and there’s no community here to help share and promote your work (as with YouTube and Slideshare)

Alternatives

Use a proper designer – you can’t beat a talented designer (like our own Jim, Luke, Joel and Mel for instance) for making your ideas come to life.

Visual.ly – a more ambitious service; they’ll design your data visualisation for you but they’re developing tools to turn data sources into infographics. And they’re starting a community around them too.

Other web-based tools – a lot are listed here on the excellent datavisualization.ch blog.

Bottom Line
I want to judge Piktochart on what it’s aiming to do — make simple infographics quickly and easily — and I think it does that pretty well. But I do think the tool will lead to lots of ‘me too’ infographics — and there are way too many of these out there already.

If I had a great idea for an infographic that I really wanted to make an impact with, I’d go to a proper designer every time. But if I wanted to capture a simple idea in a few minutes, I might give this a go.

Your thoughts?

Experiences with this or similar tools?