The Art of Storytelling
Storytelling is very much in vogue within the world of marketing at the moment, and rightly so given its power to engage audiences and bring brands to life. However, storytelling is something that can and should be used in any form of audience engagement which is why data and insights teams should be embracing the need for storytelling.
There are two benefits storytelling can bring for insights teams. The first is more obvious, namely the power of storytelling to land data and insights with the audience in a more compelling manner.
The reason storytelling can help achieve this is because of its power to take people on a journey. Whether it’s a presentation, a write-up or a report, data and insights professionals can use storytelling to take their identified audience to a controlled end point; be that landing a recommendation or simply ensuring that data is interpreted in the right way.
The second benefit builds on the ability of storytelling to take the audience on a journey by influencing the target audience over time. This is especially important for any data and insights team that is on a mission to influence the organisation, whether that’s in terms of the simple importance of data and insights within decision-making or strategic goals such as creating customer-centric thinking within the organisation.
This second benefit is possible due to the structure of storytelling that help teams assess the audience and what successful influence looks like. This influence might take weeks or months to achieve and storytelling structure can help the team achieve that.
So it’s powerful stuff and relevant to any data and insights team. Embraced in the right way it will make reports sing, presentations land and the entire data and insights team increase its influence within the business.