Storytelling effectively conveys and reinforces messages – and this is precisely the reason stories are now being used in marketing analytics.
From the moment we could understand what people around us were saying, we’ve been told stories to help us stay safe and understand the world we’ve been born into.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf shows us that making up stories to get attention can spectacularly backfire; Little Red Riding Hood tells us to not be blindly trusting; and every Dr Seuss book teaches us to be resilient in the face of life’s ups and downs.
Similarly, cultures and religions use storytelling to explain who we are and how we should live our lives – just think of the Dreamtime stories told by the First Nations peoples of this land for generations.
Storytelling effectively conveys and reinforces messages – and this is precisely the reason stories are now being used in marketing analytics. It’s called data storytelling.
So, sit back, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story about the very smart businesses that adopted data storytelling and how it improves their marketing efforts.
What is data storytelling?
Data storytelling is the process that takes complex data analysis and turns it into a narrative that is easy to understand and, hopefully, compelling to consume.
It takes data analysis and gives it context, meaning and insights, which are then used to inform future marketing activities.
How does data storytelling differ from storytelling marketing?
Data storytelling takes data from marketing campaigns and tells the story of the performance of a marketing campaign and the audience’s interaction with it.
Like all good stories, data storytelling outlines a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, it has characters (the business), a quest (to achieve sales or grow the brand), and a journey (how the business achieved its goals).
Yet, data storytelling is different to storytelling marketing. While storytelling marketing tells the story of your business and the products and services it provides, data storytelling creates a narrative about marketing campaigns.
And while storytelling marketing draws heavily on emotion in order to make the audience care about and respect the brand, data storytelling is devoid of emotions. It’s data-driven; it doesn’t want you to feel the story, it wants you to understand it.
How do you use data storytelling in marketing?
In terms of marketing, there are three parts to data storytelling:
- Data: Data storytelling collects information and analysis from campaign analytics, and uses it as the foundation of the story.
- Narrative: Data storytelling creates a storyline that explains the data and why the information is important.
- Visualisations: Data storytelling uses imagery that includes graphs, charts, diagrams, videos and photos, which are used to further explain the narrative.
The importance of data storytelling
The essential value of data storytelling is that it helps those of us who aren’t experts in data to understand marketing analytics.
It helps us process and remember large amounts of data and avoid those situations where we’re so overwhelmed with facts and figures that their actual meaning is lost.
Telling stories helps us understand the information, but importantly, also makes it memorable. Stories stay with us long after spreadsheets are filed away.
Speak to the content marketing specialists
The moral of this story is that data storytelling helps businesses make the most of their marketing analytics, which then inform future campaigns, making them stronger and more effective.
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne, and we help businesses that may not be data experts to better understand what all that data means and how they can use it.
To find out how we can help your business, give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or send us a note via the contact form below.