Storytelling marketing and data marketing are both terms that you’ve probably heard before, but have you ever considered how you can harness data to help you tell a powerful story?
Nonprofits have been using data in their marketing for years to show the impact that their works. Most often this data will be presented within an infographic format using percentages, stats, charts, and illustrations to show the impact of their work or the seriousness of the problem.
Source: Venngage Infographic Maker
Other industries can utilize data in their storytelling too. Businesses that sell their customers on the idea of change or impact are great organizations for using data in this way. This includes companies who sell their customers products that will save time or money, or companies who otherwise promise a positive impact on their customers lives.
There are three ways you can use data in your storytelling marketing:
Data visualization of an existing story
Data visualization is the most common form of data storytelling, and involves using infographics, charts, graphs, and pictograms to bring numbers to life. Using charts and graphs can be a great way to bring boring reports or white papers to life, and can be used at the start of any report to creative an executive summary.
Data visualization in this way is a supplementary visual to a pre-existing report, and can help illustrate data that you are sharing.
Crafting a narrative around data
But there is a step beyond data visualization; crafting a narrative around your data.
By using data to craft a narrative, you are building your report from the data story first. If your company sells a software that you say will save your customers money you could show a comparison chart with before and after spends. Or you could craft a narrative around what your customers can do with the money they have saved, and the impact that will have.
By showcasing the impact your product has had on your customers you are creating authority and trustworthiness. Data here is being used very much in the same way a case study would be.
Equally if your nonprofit aims to give children meals during the summer vacation you could use a pictograph to show how many children in your community are benefitting. Or you could tell the story of the children you are currently unable to help. This highlights the need for more donations or resources. In this case, data would be used to persuade your audience to donate more by using an emotive story.
Using data to write your story
You can also take data storytelling a step further and use the data to help inform the story you sell customers up top. If a certain number of your customers buy a product at the same time every year, that data can be used to hypothesis the use case of that product. Knowing this can help you craft a marketing campaign that hits the right audience, with the right messaging, at the right time.