Storytelling is the watchword in content marketing. To communicate with humans on an emotional level, you should tell stories using the same techniques that we all grew up with.
We learn from an early age through stories and there is a practical method to Storytelling that you can employ in your content marketing. Read more about this on Marketing Week or Smart Insights. Also, LinkedIn created an infographic to track the rise of storytelling in marketing, using data.
Data storytelling is the art of telling brand stories using data visualisation and that’s what we’re going to cover in this article.
Before we do though, let’s quickly take a look at ‘brand storytelling’. This is about finding a story that resonates with your audience, where your audience is the hero and your brand is merely an essential character in the story. To demonstrate that, here is just one example – a sweet advert about a relationship where Google just happens to make the difference.
The key thing to note here is that the advert is telling a story about the father and daughter rather than about the product.
Not everyone uses video storytelling, and this article is not about that. This is an important point to note – storytelling does not mean video. The two are not integrally linked.
You can tell stories with the written word, with infographics, with slide decks or in other formats. Most content marketing consists of the written word. With more than two million blog posts being published per day on WordPress.com alone (seriously, check this counter), you need to be able to stand out from the crowd.
Not only that. Each blog post only commands, on average, about 15 seconds of a person’s attention, according to this article from Time.
If you invest some time in research and planning to gather data insights, you can then add design flair to your content to tell stories in an engaging, visually appealing way.
There are two elements to this, which I will explain with some examples you can enjoy.
Let me share this example with you. Spotify’s business model is to charge subscription fees for access to a global library of music. Its story could be all about which music you should be listening to. But, it’s a data business, where algorithms track tastes and usage to make recommendations to users and help them enjoy the experience of being a customer.
Being data-minded, Spotify uses its Spotify Insights blog to tell stories about how people use Spotify and what they listen to in different situations.
