Ten steps for telling a story with data

THESE days, content marketers have started telling stories with data, and best practices are quickly emerging. Here’s some advice on how to find your story with data, and determine the best way to tell it.

When it comes to finding your story:

1. Start with your dream headline. Imagine the discoveries that you would want your data to yield. This helps you figure out what kind of data is going to be relevant to your audience.

2. Recognise your bias. To make sure that bias isn’t leading you astray, think about what someone would conclude if they had access to your full data set. If they’d likely come to a different conclusion, you’ve done too much cherry picking.

3. Look for patterns. There are times when we just want to tell an interesting story — we’re not interested in it proving something specific. Patterns provide quirky facts that catch the attention of the media and potential customers.

4. Look for surprises. The most compelling data-driven content tells the reader something that they don’t already know. If it’s not surprising, it’s going to be a boring story.

Then, when you’re ready to tell your story, follow these steps:

5. Choose the right format. A white paper, a blog post or even a simple tweeted-out graphic can all be effective ways of telling a story with data.

6. Articulate your key message. How would you summarise your story in a single sentence or tweet? Articulate that story very clearly at the top of your post or document.

7. Lead with one or two numbers. When Grant Thornton published its latest study on women in corporate leadership, it prominently noted the fact that close to a third of companies have no women in senior management. This kind of fact gets tweeted out and picked up in news stories.

8. Balance text and visuals. The best content uses text and visuals synergistically: Charts provide full context on the data you’re sharing, while text lets people understand how to interpret those charts, and why the numbers are relevant to their work.

9. Illustrate your data with human examples. Whenever you’re telling a story with data, use real or hypothetical stories of specific people to translate the numbers into a human story.

10. Make recommendations. Once you’ve done your data analysis, step back and think about how you would make different business or purchasing decisions based on the data you’ve uncovered.

(Adapted from "How Content Marketers Can Tell Better Stories with Data" at HBR.org.)