I like to think of myself as an inquisitive person, and that’s probably a quality that I started honing as a child. I was a kid who asked a LOT of questions. For subjects I found interesting, I couldn’t go deep enough—I wanted to know everything that I could. No detail was too small to overlook in the search to get the root of the story, so to speak. (This is certainly karma coming back around as my kids now ask me a million questions a day!)
As a communicator, I’ve found that my inquisitiveness is perhaps one of the strongest qualities that has helped me throughout my 16-year career. Why? Because at the end of the day, no matter what side of the aisle we sit (in house or agency; consultant or full time) or what type of company we work for (B2B, B2C, B2B2C), we are all working toward a singular goal: to reach the person at the end of the line.
People come with complicated feelings, a range of emotions, and a significant variance in how they think and act. And I am hard-wired to want to discover what motivates them to make decisions, especially purchasing decisions.
This is where data comes in. One of the most underutilized assets in the communications field and yet so powerful it can make our stories sing. It forces us, the storytellers, to stay focused on the customer. It makes the customer listen. And the best part? Building a data-driven comms strategy is really not as complex as you might think.
The data you need could already exist
Data can come from anywhere. You don’t need to invest thousands of dollars into a multi-year study on the power of X to derive insights that fuel storytelling. For one, it’s expensive, and most of us—especially right now in 2023—are tasked with doing more with much, much less.
Leverage your sales and customer success teams, if you have them. When I was working with RollWorks, our sales team ran a custom survey (at virtually no cost via SurveyMonkey) to ask prospects a handful of what I’ll call “high value” questions about their knowledge of the ABM landscape, their program maturity level, and more. Once I got wind of this, and asked for access to the survey platform, it took me about five minutes to comb through the findings and come up with a few “aha” angles. MediaPost picked up the data the next week. The even better news? The marketing and sales teams are working more in concert in 2023 to make the survey even more meaningful.
I’ve also worked with product marketing around product adoption scores, to see how and why customers are adopting what they are. Do you see a lift in customers signing up for a specific type of product? Why? Can you draw any parallels to what’s happening in the world right now? If the answer is yes, you’ve found yourself a meaningful story to capture.
If you do, however, have resources to tap into, put aside $5,000-$15,000 a quarter, and that will help you build out an incredibly meaningful survey strategy. I’ve used a ton of partners in previous lives and you’d be surprised at how far you can make your budget stretch.
And if you’re a larger scale company, I’d tell you to hook into a monthly sentiment survey and use it to power your global storytelling. Take a play from WorkHuman, a former client of mine, whose Human Workplace Index offers a monthly pulse on everything from of-the-moment worker sentiment to much larger, more complex conversations like DE&I.
Focus on the tension (even when it’s uncomfortable).
If you’ve been pitching media for any length of time, you’ll know one fact is true: the more unique your angle, the more opportunity for coverage. I’m certainly oversimplifying here—we all know how challenging it is to place a story today! But you know as much as I do that a “same old same old” just won’t cut it, especially when it comes to data.
I did a very brief search for survey + newswire, and in less than 10 seconds I popped open no fewer than 20 surveys that various companies have debuted in January 2023. And there’s one commonality I would call out in many of them: they’re not provocative enough. There’s no tension.
Tension: a strained state or condition resulting from forces acting in opposition to each other.
(Although I might prefer this definition: a relationship between ideas or qualities with conflicting demands or implications.)
I am a firm believer that exploiting tension in storytelling really makes for a compelling angle. There are so many studies claiming the same thing, that if you’re going after what a competitor has already tackled or a journalist is already writing about it, your strategy is already broken.
Let’s explore this Conversica survey, as an example: Conversica Survey Shows Chatbot Customer Experience Significantly Impacts Vendor Evaluation for One-Third of B2B Buyers. (Full disclosure: I have no direct connections to this company, nor am I connected in any way to their PR function!)
The headline is punchy, but by no means offers an obvious state of tension beyond the initial impact. However, if you really dig into the data, you can see that the lack of trust in chatbots isn’t just causing vendors to lose out in the evaluation process. They’re losing revenue:10% of buyers move directly to the next vendor on their list if the chatbot conversation is poor (more or less). That’s a bottom-line impact to the business, and that’s great storytelling tension.
What am I saying? There’s no need to sugarcoat your data. Get to the deepest impact, exploit the tension, sit in it, and offer your audience a solution for something better.
And don’t be afraid to flip it and reverse it. If your respondents said, for example, 80% agreed that their chatbot solution works for them, 20% disagree. That 20% (a full 1 in 5) of your audience don’t believe the solution works for them, there’s a much richer story opportunity there. After all, it’s one thing to use data to validate a perspective (in this case, that chatbots are a highly used software), but it’s another to prove the challenges still left to be solved. And if your company is solving those challenges in a different way, that’s a win.
All that to say, it’s really important to try to minimize bias in your data wherever possible, especially when you’re crafting your own surveys. We’re often told to work from the headline backward, but you can get into murky territory when you’re asking questions simply to validate a positive assumption.
Remember the connective tissue
Data has a shelf life. It provides an excellent pulse on a moment in time, and really expires a few months thereafter. Especially today, in our world of constant change. The insights you pulled last week are going to be irrelevant in a few months. And that’s ok.
Data is there to enrich and enhance your corporate story. It adds to the brand narrative that already exists within your organization. I think about storytelling as a wave, there are rolling hills and valleys as you reach narrative arcs and then come back down. The straight line that goes across, that’s the brand story. Data is how you drive the peaks and how you get through the valleys when you might not have that much to say.
There is so much value in data. From brand credibility and authenticity, to how it influences organizations from within. But that’s a separate conversation. Stay tuned for post #2 where I dig into data’s second superpower: bridging the gap between marketing and communications.