Spreadsheets don’t tell a story

As marcom and PR professionals, we understand the importance of storytelling. Simply displaying your content is not enough reason for media platforms and your audience to engage with you.

Understanding and telling the story that your coverage data are telling you is critical to the measurement of past campaigns, but is even more important for applying lessons learned to future campaigns.

Campaign results like a pro

We ask our clients to look to us for direction as trusted advisors and to apply our insights. But when we present spreadsheets without context, the meaning is likely misunderstood or forgotten, and when it comes time to plan the next campaign no change will occur. That’s bad for business.

Telling a story with data doesn’t simply mean you need to include charts or build an infographic. Your data contain a narrative…and it’s up to you to find it.

The narrative within the data

The importance of a narrative is that it explains what is going on within the data set. It offers context and meaning, relevance and clarity. A narrative makes sense of the journey that your campaign took as the pickup of your coverage rises and falls. What better way to help the stakeholders see the who, what, when, where and why when allocating resources for the next campaign?

I read a Think With Google paper recently. In it, Daniel Waisberg writes, “We know that data is powerful. But with a good story, it’s unforgettable…executives and managers are being bombarded with dashboards brimming with analytics. They struggle with data-driven decision making because they don’t know the story behind the data.”

Interactive charts and maps

• When could you have given your message a boost by inserting a digital campaign?
• What region responds negatively to your message? (MRP subscribers)
• What medium resonates best with your message and for how long?

It’s up to you to find the answers to these questions buried in your coverage data. Every MRP report now has a new interactive Charts Panel, where you can manipulate and engage with your data using both charts and maps to breakdown results by media type, isolate regional issues and research spikes in coverage.

As Waisberg puts it, have “a conversation with data … get acquainted with the figures to find interesting insights.”

To view a quick video on how to use this interactive tool, click here.