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Simple is often misunderstood for basic or rudimentary. Yet, when a simple solution is applied to a complex problem, it produces incredible value.
For example, a toothpaste factory had an issue where boxes would occasionally ship without any product inside. They invested $8M in sophisticated technology to scan each box and detect empty ones.
A similar company had the same issue. Their solution? Put a $20 industrial fan next to the assembly line to blow any empty boxes to the floor.
A simple solution can save you millions.
The importance of storytelling in marketing hinges on this idea of turning complexity into simplicity.
PPC data is incredibly complex for many reasons. It involves many metrics and dimensions, is ever-changing, massive in size and fast-moving.
To overcome these challenges, you need to be adept at data storytelling.
This discussion will look at how to analyze your data and turn your complex results into compelling stories that anyone understands.
Data quality is becoming increasingly important and should be a top initiative at every company. Poor and incomplete data collection can lead to a loss of revenue, wasted spend, and inaccurate decision making. A lack of quality data causes inability to accurately analyze performance, sales, and the converting customer. A good way to think about it is garbage in, garbage out; poor data input leads to poor decision making and has a direct impact on performance. As the customer journey becomes increasingly more complex, there are more ways than ever for a customer to be exposed to the brand. If you aren’t able to accurately track which channels or campaigns are driving conversions, you lose visibility into optimization insights, potential revenue sources, and the ability to properly assess why conversions are or are not occurring.
So if you run different campaigns for travel agency and you just see data as follow:
From above table you cannot tell complete story about campaign performance as it is only mentioning impressions. Its half data and half data doesn’t give you full picture.
So; there are lot of questions rising about campaigns because of incomplete data. Now you can understand about the worth of data if data is not complete then you can’t build proper understanding and not get to know “why it’s happening?” so without complete data you cannot tell about anything correct or make your decisions wisely. You will learn about a tool later in this blog which will help to bring out such results based on the PPC data.
Data storytelling isn’t usually thought of as a primary skill for marketers, yet it’s something that you do quite a lot.
You tell stories about your products, services and brands to customers. You also tell stories internally when sharing discoveries with other teams, clients or managers.
There are several reasons why marketers need to implement storytelling abilities.
Data is a substantial component of marketing. You could argue that it is the most crucial part.
If you can make sense of your data, you can unlock valuable opportunities in the market and optimize your efforts. Data offers unmatched knowledge about your customers, channels, competitors and more.
After you’ve collected, cleaned and analyzed your data, reporting is a final step. Storytelling is vital to data science because it allows you to relay your findings to others.
There can often be a knowledge gap between what you know and what your reporting audiences know. Clients may not be familiar with what each metric means and how it impacts their overall business.
Effective storytelling in marketing examples closes this gap and presents findings in a way that is accessible by all audiences.
Whether you’re a marketing agency or an in-house marketer, data communication is essential.
You utilize many strategies to help the business achieve its goals. You need to maintain a conversation with clients, teams and other stakeholders regarding why these strategies are being utilized and their effects.
Effective client communication doesn’t simply mean dumping spreadsheets on them and emailing each time you launch a new campaign or strategy.
You need to develop compelling presentations that convey these results and strategies in an accessible, understandable manner.
That’s the importance of storytelling in marketing.
Humans are naturally visual creatures. We want to see things for ourselves, not just read about them or interact with raw numbers.
A critical element of storytelling in marketing is visualization. Using charts, diagrams, heat maps and other tools, you can visually depict your data findings.
Reports that use these charts are far more accessible by audiences. When you can see how the data has behaved, understanding the significance of it happens instantly.
This will help your stakeholders and clients understand the story behind the data and give them the opportunity to interact with the information in the most natural and convenient way.
The importance of storytelling in marketing extends beyond internal communication.
Many businesses operate in highly competitive spaces. Even a very niche business will run into some amount of pressure or conflict from competing companies.
Competitor analysis allows you to not see your role and position in the market and map the entire competitive landscape.
By analyzing the competition and their strategies, it is easier to counter them with your own efforts. You’ll identify valuable gaps in the market, while also avoiding heavily saturated areas.
These insights will help you tell an engaging brand story and enhance the value and relevance of your products and other efforts.
Data storytelling is an effective vessel for transforming and improving your marketing.
Businesses don’t want to rely on guesses or assumptions to make decisions because they don’t always lead down the right path. The data-driven approach is superior because it supplies concrete evidence to guarantee accurate and practical decision-making.
The importance of storytelling in marketing is to make the data-driven approach more feasible. It makes complex data easier to understand, which allows you to use information and evidence to fuel your strategies.
Any good storyteller will talk about the importance of an emotional connection. Stories are more powerful and moving when they create an emotional reaction in the audience.
In data storytelling, you need a middle ground between emotion and information. You want people to care about the information being discussed, but they also have to understand it.
There are storytelling marketing examples where information is more vital than emotion. Other times, the opposite is true. You need to understand where this balance exists.
For instance, if you’re analyzing customer feedback data, emotion will play a central role. Their emotional responses will help fuel your decisions and empower your strategies.
Conversely, if you analyze your ad spending to optimize your budget, information plays the central role, while emotions take a back seat.
You need to think about this balance with each story you tell.
How exactly does data-driven decision-making empower your marketing strategies? There are several reasons why data needs to replace opinion-based selections.
Customers are naturally very fickle individuals. They have many options to choose from when shopping. One bad experience with your company can be all it takes to lose their loyalty permanently.
The data-driven approach ensures that you make far fewer missteps than if you relied on assumptions or gut feelings. You’ll make better decisions that deliver the most engaging and relevant experiences to customers.
Data-driven stories allow you to understand what customers really want from your business. Using these insights in advertising, you can develop more potent strategies that align with what’s most coveted in the market.
Ultimately, by adopting the data-driven approach to decision-making, you achieve a customer-centric mindset for your marketing.
It’s about putting the customer and their needs first. Not only does this improve your engagement and encourage more clicks and conversions, but it will also help your bottom line.
When customers feel that their opinions, feelings and interests are considered and captured in brand experiences, it causes them to stay loyal longer and spend more money.
It essentially gives the customer the sense that they are a part of your business, instead of just a sales number.
That’s a powerful emotion and customers won’t even entertain your competitors’ offers. They are already getting everything they want and more!
In traditional storytelling, there are essential components. You need characters, a setting, conflict, development, etc.
Data stories have similar elements that need to be established to convey the correct information and emotions properly.
The first rule of any successful storytelling is to know your audience. The audience will dictate what information you need to convey in data stories and the best ways to encapsulate the insights to ensure they are understood.
You need to ask:
Your audience can be internal or external, which changes the delivery mechanism for your story. For instance, you communicate to internal audiences with marketing reports, customer surveys, analytics and other presentations.
External audiences, meaning your clients and customers, prefer things like articles, infographics, ebooks, annual reports, whitepapers and more.
The more you know about your audience and what they want from the information you’re presenting, the better your data story will be.
With your audience established, you need to begin processing the data and looking for patterns, correlations and other insights that are meaningful to these individuals.
You want to keep your data collection concise. If you try to present too much information at once, it may be overwhelming to audiences.
That said, including too little information can make comprehension difficult. Remember, these are individuals that don’t typically interact with these metrics and data.
You don’t want to assume they know certain things because if that assumption is wrong, it will make your data story impossible to understand.
It’s a fine line to walk. You should think critically about the most important details in your analysis and only present those in your stories.
In other words, what’s the most crucial insight? While there may be interesting tertiary insights, this needs to be the core and purpose of your story.
The importance of storytelling in marketing can’t be realized without charts and visuals.
As we covered, humans need visuals to process and understand complex information quickly. Thus, you need to present your results using charts and other visualizations.
While there are plenty of PPC charting tools available, it’s not as easy as plugging the data in and pressing go. You have to consider the best type of chart to display the information.
In some instances, you may have multiple options to choose from. You have to think strategically about the best chart type to display your insights.
You also have to consider titles, colors and other minor details that may help or hurt your storytelling effort.
You want your charts to be engaging, but not too over the top.
Again, it’s about balance. You don’t want to overload charts with too many elements or details because it will distract from the core information you’re trying to convey.
Charts need to be as concise and thorough as your analysis!
Building off the key elements of marketing storytelling, let’s look at how to turn your own complex PPC data into simple stories that engage audiences. This process is crucial if you want to capitalize on the importance of storytelling in marketing.
This section will also look at multiple tools that you can use to empower data storytelling in your organization.
Before you can tell any stories, you need to have a complete understanding of the information yourself.
PPC marketing involves many different types of metrics. You need to understand what each one is and how it contributes to your overall success on Google Ads.
Moreover, PPC campaigns produce mountains of data thanks to the many combinations of metrics and dimensions.
To make matters even worse, PPC data changes at the drop of a hat. Your campaigns are influenced by:
Keeping track of all of these moving parts isn’t possible with manual analysis alone. To truly master your data and overcome all of these complexities, you need the help of artificial intelligence through some intelligent and smart tool.
PPC Signal is an AI-driven PPC optimization tool that automatically monitors your Google Ads accounts for significant performance changes.
Each time the system finds a notable trend, shift or other irregularity in your PPC data stream, it catalogs it and presents it to you on the PPC Signal dashboard.
Every active signal you see is a complete insight to include in your marketing storytelling examples.
The beauty of PPC Signal is that it removes the stressful, tedious parts of data analysis. You can focus all of your time and energy on creating compelling stories for customers and team members alike.
With PPC Signal supplying a steady stream of the latest performance insights, you always have exciting data results to present to your internal audiences.
To help you find the most relevant insights, PPC Signal allows you to filter your active alerts with various options.
You can filter by:
The options help you zoom in on the most crucial insights to present in your data stories. It’s a helpful tool when you have many active signals and want to find a specific one to showcase.
For external data stories, PPC Signal gives you a more complete understanding of your most successful PPC strategies, versus the not-so-successful ones.
Using this knowledge, you can align your campaigns to match your audiences’ current attitudes, needs and preferences. In turn, this creates more engaging ad stories that will drive additional clicks and conversions.
In short, PPC Signal enables you to use data to get inside the mindset of customers.
PPC success doesn’t happen by chance. You make strategic moves that improve your campaign performance and increase your key performance metrics.
A significant part of your data story is the background behind the results you’re presenting. For instance, what was the catalyst that increased conversions by 35%? Why is CTR higher this month than previous ones?
To add this context to your data stories, you need to log your performance changes. This will enable you to track the results of each change you make to your Google Ads account.
Again, PPC Signal can be an incredibly useful tool. You can select your actioned signals to see past changes you’ve made.
You can see every signal that you’ve resolved in the past, which will help you track the causes behind your latest results.
It’s also worth mentioning that the PPC Signal AI system is designed to compare current performance to the past automatically. Not only does this provide for more accurate insights, but it also offers context behind every signal.
Once you’ve acquired valuable insights and developed sufficient context behind those findings, your next objective is to visualize and report the data to your audiences.
Again, charts are vital tools to ensure that audiences understand the importance of your marketing stories and reach the intended conclusions.
ChartExpo PPC Charts is one of the best libraries of visualization options for marketers.
It’s an add-on for both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel to transform your spreadsheets into beautiful visualizations that audiences will love.
ChartExpo includes many charting options that suit PPC data perfectly. Some of the chart options include:
Overall, you have over 80 options to choose from. When you attach the perfect visualization to your reports, it delivers the best storytelling in marketing examples.
Another valuable tool to explore is PPCexpo PPC Reports. By using ChartExpo visualizations awesome charts have been used to design the PPC reports, this is a solution designed to help PPC marketers understand and present their results to clients or any stakeholders.
PPCexpo PPC Reports use many of the same visualizations as ChartExpo to deliver detailed presentations of various components of your ad strategies.
Some of the reports included with this tool are:
The beauty of these reports is much of the storytelling is done for you! Plus, the reports are interactive so that viewers can engage with the data firsthand.
Storytelling is used both internally and externally in marketing. Once you have a clear understanding of your target audiences, storytelling is used to deliver exceptional customer experiences that keep them coming back for more. Internally, storytelling takes the form of presentations, reports and other tools that help teams, managers, stakeholders, etc., understand complex data and marketing results.
By studying your business data, you can obtain deep insights into how to grow your company. Data tells you about your customers, competitors, industry and the market. You’ll identify your best and worst strategies and have the opportunity to adjust spending accordingly. This will help you reduce wasted money and time, which is something that every business benefits from!
There are three essential elements of data storytelling: the audience, the data itself and your delivery method. You need to have a clear idea of who the data story is intended for, whether internal or external audiences. This will help you select the right data to include in your story. Finally, you need an effective chart or another delivery method to ensure that the data story is easy to understand.
The importance of storytelling in marketing can’t be overstated.
It helps you deliver more exceptional experiences to customers, while also offering more efficient and effective internal processes.
There are plenty of examples of storytelling in marketing, but the core element is always the same: communication.
Whether you’re trying to communicate a product to customers or communicating the latest results to internal teams, storytelling is a necessary component.
It ensures that the information you’re trying to convey is engaging and understandable by the target audience.
With helpful tools like PPC Signal, ChartExpo Charts and PPCexpo PPC Reports, you can transform your raw data into compelling stories.
Start telling your stories today.
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