How to Leverage Good Data for Storytelling
A couple weeks back, we released a blog teaching you how to build marketing reports you’ll actually use. If you took our advice, you should get less questions and even been able to knock a few meetings off your calendar. That’s because good data, when presented well, turns metrics into direction, confidence, and alignment. If you’re still experiencing any of the following, we’re willing to bet you’ve built a killer dashboard, but are struggling to tell an effective story with the data:
You’re getting request after request for slices of data or ad hoc reports
Meetings have actually increased, because people have questions about the reports
Decisions are feeling more complicated and overwhelming than before
If these issues sound relevant, it’s likely because your report answers “what happened?”. A strong data story answers “what does this mean” and “what will we do about it?”.
If you’re on the email newsletter mailing list (once per week on Monday mornings), you remember our key takeaway with marketing reports was that at the core of all effective marketing reports is the question: “What decision does this support?”
Why is storytelling important when you’re handling data?
You can spend thousands of dollars on multi-touch attribution marketing tools, spend hours drilling down deeply into precise metrics, or adding widgets to your dashboards. You’re still going to be staring the same exact issue in the face.
Trends > Snapshots: direction is infinitely more important than a single data point.
Context > Precision: a rounded decimal with a practical insight is more valuable than an exact figure without explanation. Context also helps eliminate questions for the audience.
Conflicting narratives are a quiet saboteur: if every department tells different stories using similar data, alignment disappears and silently erodes the brand.
Good data storytelling brings alignment and in turn, direction, to a growing company. It’s a singular truth that everyone can operate from. This creates a shared focus. And it’s no secret that a company with shared, targeted focus is going to outrun scattered companies every. single. time.
How can you tell a story using marketing data?
Your business storytelling should follow the same outline as classic storytelling.
Identify Your Protagonist.
Who’s the main character in your story? Every story needs a shining star. In business, the protagonist doesn’t need to be a person, but it is rarely a singular data point. Is your story about:
The customer
Your revenue engine
The team
Someone/something else
Whoever your audience is (likely leadership), they need to be able to quickly identify the protagonist of the story or their eyes will glaze over before you even begin. If your brand doesn’t have an archetype, now might be a good time to define one.
Establish the context.
Some stories start with a jolt. But even if they start with something crazy happening, you can always count on the first couple of chapters to “set the scene”. You want to establish what normalcy looks like.
This is where your trends come in. You want to ground leadership in the current state trends, or reality, before you walk them over the bridge to the “after”.
Define the conflict.
Can you imagine how boring a story would be without conflict? All stories exist because something changed. When we’re dealing with data storytelling, this is typically represented as an inflection point. Whether that be:
A sudden spike in Google Ads conversions
Instagram suddenly outpaces TikTok by a mile
Your lead scoring process has completely broken when you went from 30 marketing qualified leads per month to 150 MQLs
The conflict is what makes an individuals ears perk up. It’s what makes your CMO starts leaning forward in their chair.
What are the stakes? Raise them.
If you want to tell a nice little story and be on your way, then you can stop reading here. If you want to tell stories with marketing data that drive action and urgency, you need to raise the stakes.
So far, you should’ve explained what changed and what conflict has arisen as a result. This is where you break down “why does this matter right now?”
You need to define what happens if nothing changes. This is where we outline the risks. And when you’re speaking to leadership, risk is what holds their attention.
Bring resolution to the storyline.
Unless you want about eight more weekly meetings added to your calendar, you need to bring it full circle with a resolution. This is where you don’t ask, but you define:
What are we doing next?
What are we not doing next?
Let’s walk through an example.
Let’s pretend The 128 Collective is an outsourced marketing operations & strategy partner for an e-commerce brand that sells formal shoes for kids and targets the top 10% of earners. They use organic and paid marketing channels. As their MOps/Strategy partner, we want to arm them with data that helps them understand their customer, their buying motivations, and identify avenues for growth.
The Protagonist.
Our protagonist is the parents we’re targeting who are in the top 10% of earners in the world. They purchase high end formal shoes for children for events like weddings, holidays, school events, vacations. These parents care more about quality and appearance than price.
Setting the Scene.
For the last 12 months, this customer has followed a predictable pattern:
92% of the time, their brand entry point is from organic channels. The majority is through organic search and then after is the social channels driving traffic.
Paid media has shown to be effective at driving purchases, but only after intent is shown. When we’re classifying intent, we’re talking about spending more than two minutes on the website and revisiting multiple times to review products.
The average order value remains high, and has grown by 6% YoY, indicating the brands current positioning is premium and continues to be placed in front of the right people.
Purchase cycles remain longer, indicating this audience is not going to fall for impulse buys or marketing that encourages impulse buys.
Let’s introduce some conflict.
Over the last 60 days, we’ve noticed something unusual.
In general, traffic volume is up mainly due to paid traffic.
Paid traffic is beginning to outpace organic traffic for brand entry points.
However, conversion rate for all paid traffic has been on a steady decline.
While organic traffic hasn’t decreased but rather remained stable, the conversion rate and average order value for organic traffic has increased by 10% in the last 60 days.
Now, let’s introduce the stakes. And then raise them.
Leadership may feel inclined to ask marketing to optimize paid ads, but if we opt to attempt this for volume or short-term ROAS, we are risking:
Attracting lower intent shoppers who care more about price than quality/appearance
Diluting our brand image by attracting the wrong types of shoppers
Training algorithms to position this brand in front of shoppers who are price sensitive and will churn faster
Our organic data tells a consistent story:
Our high-income buyers consistently have longer purchase cycles
They need to consume more content before purchasing
Once they trust us, they will spend more and their lifecycle extends significantly
If we ignore this, we optimize against our best customers instead of for them.
The resolution.
Here’s what we’re doing:
Reallocate paid media budget to remarketing with the sole intent to amplify
Tighten paid targeting and creative around occasion-based messaging, not discounts
Use organic content to do the heavy lifting on trust, quality, and brand story
Measure success on conversion quality and AOV, not just traffic and CPA
Here’s what we’re not doing:
Increasing budget for paid ads to chase volume
We are not optimizing toward lower-cost audiences that don’t match the brand
We are not changing pricing or promotions based on short-term paid performance
Closing
Good data storytelling is meant to make us more effective as marketers. We create alignment within an organization and this alignment naturally creates focus. The data you have already has a story - you just need to package that story and ensure it is helping you support a concrete business decision.
If you need help with marketing operations or strategy (things like learning how to tell good stories with your data), drop us a line. We’re available to help.
