Every PR professional struggles with periods where there’s either nothing going on or there’s a lot going on that doesn’t fit your company’s storylines. The pandemic was a good example of this – companies held onto their product and customer releases, trade shows shut down or went virtual and so on. There was seemingly nothing to reach out to the media and analysts with unless you had a good pandemic story to tell. Or was there?
Whether your company is in a slow news cycle, or you are just looking for new reasons to stay relevant with the media that’s important to your company, having access to data and telling a story with it can help you stand out from the crowd.
Data-driven storytelling, as this method is called, uses data to help you craft stories that other companies simply can’t tell. Data-driven storytelling can position your company as one that adds value to the industry. Instead of reaching out to reporters to cover your news, you’re instead providing information that is valuable to them. They can use this data in a variety of ways (and hopefully some of those ways involve your company).
Let’s be clear: Gaining access to data can be time-consuming. The best kind of data is original research, where an audience is surveyed for its opinions, ratings, buying patterns and more. This audience can be a customer base or user group, a Twitter audience, respondents picked by a third-party survey firm, or another source. Original research allows you to gather data on topics that journalists might not have easy access to. And because you “own” the questions from this survey, you can frame Q&As in ways that will be most compelling to reporters, and to your customer base at large.
A second kind of data is third-party data aggregated from several sources. A good example of this is the “Data Never Sleeps” infographic compiled annually by business intelligence firm Domo. Using stats from companies such as Instagram, Spotify, Venmo and other digital firms, the infographic shows what happens in an “Internet Minute.”
Once you have access to your data, there are several things you can do with it:
- Offer it to publications that are known for creating data-driven stories, like Forbes, Fortune and TechCrunch.
- Create a press release announcing the most salient points of your data and put it on the newswire with a graphic.
- Develop an infographic that uses individual data points to tell an overall story.
- Use social channels to help spread the word, using hashtags to help guide your audience to share.
Does your company need help with data-driven storytelling? Contact Calysto to learn more.