By: Allison Rodriguez
This Thanksgiving the team here at PRP is most grateful for, well, you! We have been overwhelmed by the amount of participation that you and our other site visitors have contributed to the content we’ve created for our website. Sure, we think it’s great, but what matters is that the ed tech community finds it helpful and informative. Your positive feedback has meant the world to us!
To show our thanks, we’re posting one of our most popular downloadable content offers, the Quick-Start Guide to Data-Driven Storytelling, ungated for anyone interested. All you have to do is scroll down and enjoy!
PRP Quick Start Guide to Data-Driven Storytelling
In every PR or marketing campaign PRP creates for the members of our client family, we bring together the ancient art of telling stories and the cutting-edge science of measuring the impact of those stories with hard data. Our storytelling is truly driven by data because we use the information we gather from one story to determine 1) what the next story should be and, 2) who needs to hear it. Does this sound like an approach that might work for your company?
You can give it a whirl in a few quick steps:
- Identify a compelling story.
At PRP, we love to shine a light on positive stories about innovative educators. Every data-driven storytelling campaign starts with a story that is timely, useful, and emotionally engaging. The most powerful stories grab the reader with a compelling character or conflict and keep educators reading with best practices that they can use to solve the challenges they are facing in their own schools or districts.
- Tell the story in the form that brings it most gloriously to life.
Stories come in many shapes and sizes, from charts and infographics to published articles and ebooks. The ideal form of any given story depends on what information you have in hand and what you want to achieve with that story. What message do you want to send? What action do you want to inspire readers to take? And perhaps most importantly, who do you want to reach
- Deliver the story to the right audience.
Whether you want to cast the widest possible net, are looking for an outlet that targets certain job descriptions, or have detailed buyer personas who you are trying to reach, choosing the right audience can be the difference between a story that lands with a thud and one that goes viral. Connecting with your ideal audience takes more than choosing a relevant media outlet and hoping for your story to be found. It takes targeted email and/or social media outreach, and it takes timing. Education decision-makers are chronically busy, so your mission is to find them where and when they have a second to read your story.
- Guide readers to your website and give them clear options once they get there.
Laying out the welcome mat with a link to your homepage is a start, but you’ll get better data (and more leads) if you point website visitors where you want them to go. Whether you send them to a landing page that gathers some of their info or a blog post that ends with a call to action offering them more useful content, you should always start your campaigns with logical and seamless conversion paths in place.
- Gather data on how your audience interacts with the story.
The analytics tools and techniques you use are up to you—here are PRP we use both Google Analytics and HubSpot—but the key is to use every story to gather data that will tell you what you want to know about your audience. (Spoiler alert: it’s not impressions.) The good news is that you can learn a lot about someone from how they click around your website.
- Analyze the data to learn what your next story will be.
Data-driven storytelling is uniquely suited to the education marketplace because the entire process is a learning experience. You craft a story, you share it, you see what the response is. Then, based on what you’ve learned, you either offer up more of the same or head back to the drawing board and try something new. Just as in education, repetition is key. Oftentimes, to find what works you first have to find what doesn’t work.
We hope that you found this guide helpful, and are ready to start crafting some data-driven stories for your company! Want to save this as a PDF resource to refer back to in the future? Follow this link to download!
Thanks for sharing!
