Hubspot says that billions of people use social media globally. Do you agree with the fact that if your business is not online, sooner or later it will run out of business? With such overwhelming engagement of people on social media, undoubtedly it has emerged as one of the best channels to get new leads and promote your business. However, how do you catch your audience’s attention citing such huge competition?
Why Storytelling?
What is it about your business that drives people crazy? What is it that forces them to press that “like” button on your post or leave a comment in the “comments section below”?
Well, the goal is to make a human connection. The goal is to stand apart from the crowd mechanically leveraging social media handles. It’s a well-established fact that all of us love stories. We relate to a well-told story like nothing else. Stories help your prospects make sense of the decisions they are about to make. Whether it’s the decision of subscribing to your email list or buying your product’s annual subscription. Your story is “why” you are doing “what” you are doing and “how” it makes a real difference to the world.It’s about standing out and not blending in! But, how do you tell great stories? What does a great story look like?
What Do You Need to Tell a Great Story?
A Great Story = Visualization + Context + Content
Data, visuals, and graphics have been used to tell great stories for long. However, over the past couple of years, the “greatness” has disappeared from the stories. Plain stories are left behind. A graph chart displaying some statistics related to business intelligence, and analytics, that pretty much sums how data is leveraged to tell stories. Telling stories using data and analytics, which people can actually relate to, demands rich and intuitive data visualizations.
Overwhelming information with flashy and non-targeted visualizations (hard to decipher) ruins almost everything a great story has to tell. Telling stories with data and analytics has a lot more to it than creating a bar chart and uploading it to a dashboard or PPT. A context and an accompanying content are indispensable.
A great story using data and analytics must convey why the information being shown is relevant to a business’s strategies and operations or how it solves the pain point of its consumers and potential customers.
What else does a great story take? It takes detail! Detail to an impressive level. The seemingly insignificant details must paint a picture in someone’s mind to truly make the story complete. Including data and analytics in your marketing strategies should enable you to tell the stories crucial for successful campaigns and customer journeys. However, understanding all the data correctly, extracting the key takeaways, and turning it into a great story is not easy. A lot of organizations struggle hard with this.
How to Tell a Great Story Using Data and Analytics?
It’s All About Engagement
Some of the great minds working in the data and analytics can comprehend huge data sets but they often fail when asked to help someone else understand the findings. Stories are all about engagement. One of the must-have skills for those working with data analytics is the art of presenting data in an engaging way. Your story should be digestible and should get people asking questions. Commonly people turn to data visualizations for this, but your creativity lies at the heart of finalizing what visualization brings the best out of data.
Because, not all graphs are easy to understand! Brainstorm hard and finalize how you want to present the data. Whether you want to go for charts, graphs, infographics, etc. Studies indicate that audiences prefer visual elements to numbers in presentations and will remember information more accurately and till long when presented to using visualizations. You can turn to tools such as Taswira for a new way to report and tell effective data stories. The tool helps you turn data into amazing visualizations with a context, driving the idea home properly.
It’s Not an Art Project
Your business story is not your art project. Period. Yes, colors enhance engagement, but they should be pleasing for the eye, not distracting. Under no circumstances and at no cost should your story distract the audience from the key takeaway. Don’t use a pie chart just because you see everyone using it, or you personally like it. The design element should help people relate to the story and find it engaging but it should not be the best and the only thing about your story.
It Must Have a Context
If your story has plain figures, facts, and data, it may essentially not be a story. Understand your audience well and structure your story in phases for them. Help them have a context. Help them understand “why” you are saying “what” you are saying and “how” it would help them.
Odds of a significant section of your audience needing help understanding where you are coming from are pretty high. If you have multiple visualizations to share, have a linear approach. Start with the essential background they may need to grasp what’s underway.
While some of the phases of the story may be more relevant and important, it is important that you pay due attention to each without taking forever to complete it! Work on telling it in such a way that the listeners feel like they are there, living the situation.
Have a Timeline
Finally, your story must have a timeline. You should seem like progressing onto something. Don’t make it all about haphazardly conveyed, bland facts and figures. Tell your story in a clear beginning, middle and end order. Remove everything extra.
While studying data sets you may have a lot to share, but you must filter what’s essential and what’s not. Filter your findings and work on ways to present them in a linear fashion, progressing gradually from the beginning to the end. Stories are how audiences remember what you said.
Storytelling in Action
One of the best examples of brands that have experienced the difference storytelling makes is Unthinkable Media. The brand worked hard for years to gain capture the audience’s attention. Surprisingly, when traditional methods failed, storytelling came to their rescue. The company shifted its focus from impressions to subscribers. Things changed drastically when the firm focused on creating a community and making people a part of their story! In an era where a lot of people are selling what you are selling, it’s your story that differentiates you and provides you with an identity of your own.
And, that unique identity is your USP, that is what sells! When you tell the “Why”, you are making a human connection and engage people well and that works without fail. Happy storytelling!