What is Data Storytelling?

The very ability to use data to tell a story and adjust it to present to your audience is all about data storytelling. Data storytelling is comparable to human storytelling, but it includes deeper insights and supporting facts in the form of graphs and charts.

Data storytelling is a category of Business Intelligence that comes from another Subcategory: Data Visualization. When Excel and other software becomes inefficient, Data Visualization comes into play. One can define it as an "art of telling numbers" in a simple yet constructive way, enabling us to communicate and understand complicated figures & convert data to visuals such as graphs, maps, graphs, charts, and more.

It's no longer limited to giant firms but employees working in every business sector who want to learn more about the company's activities by keeping up with its daily data.                        

Make an Impact with Data Storytelling

It's always been a joy for people to tell stories. To communicate stories using data, however, we must consider the nature of storytelling and modify it to assist our viewers in making sense of their data. Adding context, enhancing engagement, and integrating emotions are just a few methods to improve your data storytelling.

Focus on clarity

Several factors need to be considered when it comes to data storytelling on marketing reports, and the most important one is visualization clarity. Make sure your data visualizations are simple enough to be understood in one glance, not complicated to create confusion. Just a lot of explanatory messages on the periphery, overlapping lines, and colors; these design decisions can make queries and cognitive burden to the audience. To keep the audience's attention and their eyes and minds focused, adopt contrasting colors and regular shapes with assistance text placed near the graphs.      

The Importance of Context

"Content is king, "As they say in marketing, but when it comes to data storytelling, the context wins every time. Data storytelling requires a combination of visualization, context, and storytelling. Even the most complex hockey-stick line chart must be simple to comprehend and completely explainable.

Several marketing data visualizations are better than others in illustrating trends and context. For example, line charts and heatmaps are great for showing changes over time and data set variability and clusters of interest, while scattering charts and bar graphs are mutual at a particular point in time, suitable for checking the action at hand.

Decisions are made based on data.

Data storytelling makes it easy to see your decisions and which elements in your report are pushing the ladder up. Rather than dumping all facts you have at your disposal into a report, give attention to the inputs you need to emphasize.

Be Goal-oriented

Even if you're using the data to promote a specific point of view, your data visualization should portray the facts objectively. Any deceitful manipulation, whether deliberate or inadvertent, can lead to inconsistency, lower your credibility, and decrease the audience's trust in your knowledge. To represent your data realistically, eliminate ambiguity by using proper labeling, matching graphic proportions to data dimensions, and ensuring that the design elements do not compromise the data.

Final Thoughts

The importance of simplicity in Data storytelling cannot be overstated. Attempt to convey as much information as possible in a single glance. Keep cognitive load principles in mind when constructing your reports to better align with human behavior.

The simplest method to incorporate storytelling into your data visualizations is to frame each graphic with a question... In a nutshell, what story does your report present?

‍