Data Storytelling Examples: Businesses That Use Their Data In Creative Ways (That You Can Copy)
Analytics - used for changing UX for better conversion rates, optimizing marketing campaigns, and reporting performance. And that’s it. Right?
Not true! You can make the data that your business generates work for you in countless ways.
Think: Press releases, sales pitches, additional benefits and perks for your customers, and more.
Data Storytelling Examples: How To Use Your Data In More Ways
So you have millions of records of customer data - how they use your product, what they’re interested in and how their interests have changed over time. What if you used that data to:
Write really cool press releases about market trends
Create an end of year summary for each customer about their purchase habits
Make sales materials to entice new leads
Using your data outside of the business is another way to delight your customers and entice your investors.
Example One: Spotify’s Wrapped
Spotify is one of the most famous data storytellers out there. As a streaming platform, they collect endless amounts of data on streaming behaviors.
Instead of using this only for their optimization efforts, Spotify also creates a year-end summary for listeners.
The result is shareable, story-worthy, and delightful. And they go all out with it, showing insights on genres, habits, and making it something that is an experience all in itself.
Obviously, a lot of work goes into what Spotify does here - but they are thinking about data in a way that many businesses don’t. And, the result is something that boosts their visibility as customers reshare it.
And, as data-lovers ourselves, it’s always fun to see what our colleagues are listening to (and sometimes a little terrifying too!).
Example Two: KAYAK & momondo - Using Data for Press Releases & More
momondo, a flight and hotel metasearch that was purchased by KAYAK has been using the search trends from their metasearch to create interesting press releases for years.
When you generate as much data as a metasearch, you have a unique opportunity to use the insights from things like peak travel seasons to talk more about your business. And that’s exactly what momondo has done in the past with their Annual Flight Studies.
We often think that press releases are only for business announcements like company buy-outs. If you can find a story that will intrigue news sources, you can make a press release about it.
If you find an interesting trend in your data that could be representative of a larger group, then you can use that to weave a story. How did your customer behavior change during COVID, for example?
Example 3: GoodRead’s Year-End Review
Similar concept to Spotify’s Wrapped, with a more simplistic result that almost any business could likely afford.
Goodreads easily has access to the number of books someone read, their relative popularity, and the pages in each book. Creating a dashboard with this information gives them another engagement point with their users.
While we haven’t seen the results from these types of efforts from Spotify or Goodreads (if you work for one of those companies, let us know!) we can guess that it increases engagement. You have given your customers another reason to return to your site, and every time you do that you have another opportunity to grow your relationship with them.
Example Four: Terawatt’s Annual Professional Development Survey
You don’t have to be generating a lot of internal data to begin data storytelling.
If you’re like Terawatt you can use audiences outside of your customers to create meaningful stories to use for sales.
The professional development and coaching platform created a survey for an audience of employees and businesses to gauge sentiments on professional development programs. And as a result, they created a lead magnet, sales copy, and marketing materials for an entire year!
Terawatt worked with us at Insight Lime Analytics to design a survey that would give the company sound insights and juicy sales copy. You can see more about our survey design processes here.
Let’s get squeezing!
Ready to learn how to take full advantage of the data your company creates? Our data strategy and analytics experts are standing by to help you with your next data-driven project.
“Insight Lime creates surveys for my company that make us seem far smarter, bigger and more accomplished than we are. We started the survey as a sales tool, but it has become an incredible talking point that gives us so much authority an an expert. Just far surpassed what I expected.”