Why You Should Refer to Analytics as 'Data Stories'

Marketing data has a lot to do with “the numbers," but those numbers are useless without the story behind it. Approach data analysis like a compelling story, uncovering conflicts, solutions, themes, and characters that exist within a certain setting. Refer to analytics as "data stories" to take a deeper look at the meaning behind the numbers, rather than just focusing on surface-level insights.

To create a meaningful narrative, delve into the various components that make up a compelling data story.

Just as stories have main characters, your marketing data has key players such as your target audience, competitors, and influencers. Identify and understand these characters to grasp the full context of your data story.

Let’s start with your audience. Creating buyer personas is a great way to get to know them. In a way, buyer personas are like you’re developing characters for your data story. Learning more about your audience and their demographics, habits, and tendencies will help you form a well-rounded persona. In turn, you can use these personas to inform decisions about how you use your messaging and platforms to reach them, changing the course of your data story.

Competitors also influence your data story. Perform competitor analysis to see how your products and services, social media efforts, and target audiences compare. From here, you can adopt new strategies to test for your business or organization.

Influencers are other key players in your data story. An effective influencer campaign can positively impact your business or organization, turning their loyal followers into fans of yours. On the other hand, if an influencer you work with gets “canceled,” you face a negative impact. Choose your influencers carefully and be prepared to manage a crisis if one appears. 

Every good story has a plot. In marketing data, the plot is revealed through trends, patterns, and significant changes over time. Look for these narrative elements to understand what your data is telling you.

You can learn a lot from trends and patterns over time, but only if you analyze what the squiggles and lines mean. For example: you’re taking a look at your Instagram page’s engagements over the past six months. The line is fairly steady, besides two large jumps in engagements on two specific dates. Scroll through your Instagram page to identify what you posted on those two dates. Are the two posts similar in nature, or are they completely different? What made people engage with these posts? Identify how and why your key players interacted with your content to refine your content creation strategies. 

Stories often involve conflicts or challenges that characters must overcome. In marketing, challenges could be declining sales, increased competition, or shifting customer preferences. Identify these conflicts in your data to develop strategies to overcome them.

The first step to fixing a problem is finding the source. You notice your sales are down, and it’s time to find out why. Taking a critical look at your analytics will help you figure out the problem. Build context around your challenge to understand the cause. Are sales down month over month or year over year? Could seasonality be at play? Was there a shift in social media strategy that reduced website traffic? Use what you know about your data’s trends to create hypotheses about why this decline happened. Next, you can come up with a solution to fix that problem.

The resolution of a story is where conflicts are settled and lessons are learned. In data analysis, this is where you draw insights and determine actions to take based on your findings.

Once you look at your data trends and identify your problem, you can start testing a solution. Create a strategy to tackle the problem, complete with goals, objectives, and key performance indicators. If the solution is not working, test a different approach, but don’t give up! After all, some of your favorite stories would never be complete if the author gave up in the middle. Be the author of your own data story, and work to find solutions to create a happy ending.

Now that you know all the aspects of a good data story, it’s time to give yours a thorough read. 

Determine which metrics are most important for understanding your marketing performance, such as website traffic, conversion rates, or customer lifetime value. With a vast amount of data, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Choose several key metrics that help you focus on what is most relevant to your goals. 

Use charts, graphs, and dashboards to visualize your data and make it easier to spot trends and patterns. This will make your data easier to comprehend, leading to new exploration and decision-making. Effective data visualizations tell a compelling story, helping you understand the context and significance of the information. 

Break down your data into smaller segments based on criteria like demographics, behaviors, or acquisition channels to gain more detailed insights. Analyzing specific groups will help you find more targeted and meaningful insights. This will reveal trends that may be obscured when looking at the entire dataset. 

Identify relationships between different metrics to understand how they impact each other. By understanding these relationships, you can uncover potential causes and efforts, dependencies, or patterns that may not be immediately apparent when looking at individual metrics. From there, you can use this information to predict future trends and patterns and adjust accordingly. 

Based on your analysis, identify specific actions you can take to improve your marketing performance, such as optimizing ad targeting, tweaking landing pages, or adjusting your messaging. Drawing actions from your insights will ensure that your investment in data collection and analysis leads to tangible outcomes and returns. 

Implement changes based on your insights, then continually monitor and analyze new data to see the impact of your actions and identify new opportunities for improvement. Validate assumptions, identify flaws, and mitigate risks to take your marketing to the next level. 

Treating your marketing data as a story will help bring it to life and uncover valuable insights. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of the underlying narratives that drive your marketing performance. As your business evolves, so will the characters, plots, and conflicts within your data. The true power of your marketing data lies not just in the numbers themselves but in the rich, multi-layered story they reveal.