A great story requires two strong aspects – visualization and details. To truly construct an impactful story, minor fragments of details must be compiled together in order to formulate an entire picture in a person’s mind. Data and analytics work on similar grounds. Small fragments of analytics when included in marketing strategies result in compelling stories that act as a strong base for successful campaigns. However, it has always been a challenge to interpret all that data correctly and extract meaning out of it. Turning that data into valuable insights is something all organizations are struggling to accomplish.
What exactly is storytelling with data?
Data is just another form of random information, numbers and text unless it is transformed into a story. Visualization of data through dashboards and reports can prove to be quite overwhelming for businesses when the data is not associated together in the correct manner. But, why is it important to visually show data? The answer simple – it provides actionable insights. Data visualization utilizes data and statistics in a creative manner to depict patterns. Data analysts analyse the visual data and draw conclusions regarding a hypothesis, to prove theories, helping organizations take critical business decisions.
A comprehensive data-driven story is beneficial for both stakeholders and customers as it ameliorates decision making and also helps in increases sales. Deep insights about your customers can be generated by carefully observing the data depicted through data visualization. This can help businesses improve their lead generation and customer acquisition/retention strategies.
Amalgamation of analytics and business: Who are we telling the story to?
Knowing your target audience can help decide what data is most important for your business. It is common for firms to get overwhelmed while analysing statistics, especially when they have not sorted the unnecessary information out. Once the important data is narrowed down, analysts can begin to transform it into visualization. Focusing on target audience can facilitate in building different aspects of the story such as how to achieve more conversions? what should the company continue to do in order to remain successful? How can we ensure better customer experience?
Its interesting to point out that to know your audience better, you must know how to interpret your data. Story telling through data provides answers to critical business questions by providing solutions to the issues that one is trying to resolve.
A successful data storytelling example is of a campaign by Whirlpool. The company stumbled upon a data indicating that approximately 4000 students get dropped out of school every day. This data also suggested that one of the major reasons for students opting to drop out of school was that their families didn’t have the capability to afford washers and dryers, leaving kids embarrassed to attend school in soiled clothes. Whirlpool leveraged this data and launched a campaign to install washing machines in schools. This solved the problem of children having to wear unwashed and dirty clothes which led to a 90% increase in school attendance.
Conclusion
Data storytelling or data visualization can be a compelling task for organizations but, in order to accelerate business growth, firms must harness the power of data to the fullest. Top market research and data analytics companies provide bespoke data analytics services that help organizations take crucial business decisions.
