Why Your Storytelling Sucks (And How to Fix It Now!)
Since its launch in 2016, every year, on some random day in December, everyone's social media feed is completely covered with their top artists, songs, and playlists from the previous year. Known as, Spotify Wrapped, Spotify would gather data from their listeners and make little interactive graphs, charts and visualizations of their users' listening habits.
Using data and transforming it into charts and graphs, digestible for your audience is what we call, Data Storytelling, and it's what every brand, including you, should be doing.
Data Storytelling is the ability to effectively communicate insights from a dataset using narratives and visualizations. While Spotify uses fun animated charts and graphs, it's not just about that. It's about understanding your target audience and delivering to their taste. For example, it's like seeing an ad on Facebook or Youtube that is specifically tailored to you and what you are planning to buy. It's no accident; collecting data to ensure that their brand and products are aligning up with their audience's interest is what it's all about.
And that's what you, as a brand, should be doing.
Data Storytelling serves as 2 critical purposes:
Understanding your audience's preferences
Crafting campaigns that resonates with your audience
Knowing your audiences' wants, needs and desires allows you to affect what services and content you are offering to them. But how can you start incorporating Data Storytelling into your brand and marketing? Here's a few tools to get you started.
Google Analytics, Tableau and Hubspot are great platforms to help you gather data about your audience to turn it into a great data storytelling piece.
Google Analytics: Tailored to track website activity, highlights user demographics and enables conversation tracking.
Tableau: Brings data to life and allows you to convert wordy spreadsheets and documents into interactive dashboards, which is easy and digestible for yourself and users.
HubSpot: Integrates content management and social media management into one compact platform.
When incorporating data into storytelling, it's essential to ensure that three key elements are intertwined: Data, Narrative being told, and finally the Visualizations used to convey the data. By showing these elements, you can create compelling stories that resonate with your audience on a deeper level.
BY JETTA M. HOLIDAY
MARKETING INTERN AT LM