Data-Driven Storytelling
Here’s an obvious statement: data-driven decision making is a must for modern businesses and, frankly, every field. So, just as you wouldn’t want to go see a doctor who didn’t practice evidence-based medicine, you should not accept a communications strategy that isn’t rooted in data. The “ready, fire, aim” method of old-school publicity simply doesn’t have a place in today’s practice. And, frankly, it doesn’t generate the results that will demonstrate a strong return on investment.
Brands that are successful storytellers craft narratives based on audience analysis, behavioral insights, and trend research.
Everything should be built around your audience. Your stories need to be intentionally designed to resonate with them. To do that, you need to conduct research into who they are in terms of their interests, geographic location, education, and any other determining factors that may be relevant to your industry. From there, you can discover where that audience is consuming media and what kinds of media they are responding to. For example, if you’re looking to drive sales of a consumer product designed for Gen Z, landing a prestigious spot on the front page of The Wall Street Journal isn’t going to help your company meet its goals. The more you know about who you need to engage, the more your PR strategy can be targeted to their wants and needs.
Your audiences’ behaviors also provide insightful data that can inform your storytelling. Traditional demographics are generic and have decreased in popularity with the rise of data availability. In fact, a study by Marketing Week found that behavioral segmentation is the most used tool by marketers. PR practitioners should follow this lead.
By analyzing behavioral insights, you can identify the small nudges that PR can make to drive action. In their book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein describes a nudge as, “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way.” When it comes to using nudges, it is important to simply structure complex choices. If a health system knew many of its patients seeking hip replacements were going to its competitor, a nudge could help retain those patients. This could come in the form of an interview in the local newspaper with an orthopedic surgeon or a social media campaign about the health system’s new physical therapy practices located in the local community.
Assessing your brand’s health is also critical for understanding what content to create. Brand health is a “comprehensive evaluation of a brand’s performance, reputation, and consumer perception,” and natural language processing can be a powerful tool in assessing your brand health. One of the best ways to accurately identify trends and measure your brand association is with natural language processing. Natural language processing is, “a field of study in computer science and linguistics that is often considered a branch of artificial intelligence. It studies the problems of interpreting and manipulating human (aka natural) language. The goal is to teach computers to ‘understand’ statements in human languages well enough for specific tasks such as a voice assistant, a search engine, or measuring the sentiment of a conversation.” Products like Meltwater use natural language processing to not only assign tone to different types of articles, but to assign tone to individual words and phrases to provide even deeper context. This gives us the power to understand how a brand is perceived, where reputation liabilities may lurk, and new areas of opportunity to lead conversations.
In an ever-noisier consumer atmosphere, it is essential to root your decision-making and storytelling in data. Developing a deep understanding of your audience will help you to provide value to them in your content, as well as allow you to guide their buying decisions.