Benefits of Data Storytelling
To celebrate Pi Day, an annual recognition of Albert Einstein’s birthday and the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, I provide this infographic about the power of data storytelling. Just as pi has infinite digits, converting numbers into easy-to-understand infographics has infinite potential to grab the attention of your target audience.
Whether you are presenting investment returns or discussing business trends or something in between, you want to avoid number overload. (Compliance reporting is another matter.) Since the goal of content marketing is to educate, engage, entertain, and empower (the 4 E’s), you want to repackage your raw data set with the end user in mind. How you accomplish that is a topic for another post. The good news is you have choices – lots of them, from bubble maps to donut charts, and much more. You can create animated data visuals. You can add interactive functionality so your target audience can filter the data you present by categories such as time, industry, and income levels. You can add features for others to share your copyrighted visuals, thereby boosting your SEO and social media footprint. The possibilities are endless.
As wonderful as visuals are to tell compelling executive and corporate brand stories, you must exercise caution. Plopping data into a template without understanding the needs of decision makers who will view your work is a fool’s game. You must convey what your data represents (and does not represent) and where it comes from. Be ethical and upfront with the inputs you use to generate visual outputs. Heed the words of British economist Ronald Coase about data manipulation. He said, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” You want to build trust by being transparent.
Data storytelling is both an art and a science. As a business and finance writer, I combine my knowledge of math and experience as an accomplished industry content consultant to create data-driven visuals that are actionable and honest. Data visuals, in whatever form, are a powerful tool to enrich the words that comprise your brand message.
Tags: Animation, Data Visualization, Interactivity, SEO, Social Media
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Susan Mangiero
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