The playbook for viral data storytelling
Peter Walker shares how Carta makes data insights go viral — and how you can too.
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The power of combining data and storytelling
With so much information available, how do you get your audience to care about your content? One way is through data storytelling. The practice of boiling down large amounts of information into clear, shareable graphics is driving incredible impact for some companies.
To learn more about it, we spoke to Peter Walker, head of the insights team at Carta. Peter is an industry veteran known for unearthing juicy information about the startup industry that people love to discuss. His posts on LinkedIn get thousandsoflikes and hundreds of comments and reposts. At Carta, his team draws upon proprietary data to produce social media posts, a newsletter, and a podcast.
We spoke to him about the importance of data storytelling, how to get started with it, and tips on how to run a successful data-driven content strategy.
Why data storytelling is so important
While Peter worked in data visualization at early stage startups, he moonlit at The COVID Tracking Project. This was during the early days of the pandemic, when everyone was trying to make sense of a lot of new information. There, he learned that data graphics can help create clarity out of noise. When they’re readily shareable, they can also contribute to a conversation and convince audiences who may have different viewpoints.
Data gives you a solid backing and credibility for what you say. That is the power of data. Done well, data storytelling brands you as a thought leader and instills trust. For customers, making a purchase from your brand is much easier when they already trust you.
Common misconceptions about data content marketing
Misconception 1: You need a lot of data
Good stories don’t necessarily need a ton of data to tell. You could focus on a space where there’s not a lot of data (either your own, or public data), and create content in that space. That way, there’s less competition for the topic you’re creating content around.
Misconception 2: You need proprietary data
You don’t need to produce a lot of your own data. You could also tell a data story by using publicly available numbers, but telling a clearer story using those numbers. For example, there are companies that have more data than Carta, but Carta’s posts go viral because they know the content their audience is interested in consuming.
Misconception 3: Less is more
Simply putting out one big quarterly data report won’t work. You need to put out content often in order to achieve visibility and engagement.
Carta puts out insights 4-5 times a week. Producing more content is more effective because you get more feedback, quicker. As Peter explains: “Each one of these graphics has a chance to go viral in a way that a quarterly PDF is just not going to.”
Misconception 4: Posting a lot is harder than posting quarterly
While it may seem counterintuitive, putting out more content is actually easier than creating less. If you're in the data that much, then the story just becomes much more natural. You start noticing connections among the data. In the beginning, it took Peter more than an hour to create one LinkedIn post. Now, he can do it in 25 minutes.
If you’re struggling with this at first, try blocking off dedicated time every day to make a data graphic. When Peter was getting started, he had a block on his calendar from 8-8:40am simply titled “create something.”
How to get started telling stories with data
Now that we’ve established that any startup can use data to tell stories that promote their brand, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do that.
1. Build one graphic for social media
Creating one simple data graphic and posting it on one or two social channels is the quickest way to enter a conversation in your industry. Peter advises trying to do this at least 2-3 times per week. The repetition of content creation will help you get better at it.
Don’t be worried if you have a few months of low engagement — that’s normal. Focus on just one or two channels and don’t switch courses before you have enough time to build your presence on those channels. In his first few years at Carta, for example, Peter’s team decided to just focus on LinkedIn and the newsletter. Now, they’ve only expanded to a podcast because they can trust that those two channels will continue to perform well.
2. Use both data and graphic design tools.
Effective data stories make sense of the numbers, but also look clear and well-designed. Here’s how Peter creates content for a post:
Use SQL to get a clean data set. (Note that if you want to produce insights off your own data, you have to anonymize customer data to protect sensitive information).
Upload that data and build graphics in a database tool. Peter prefers Tableau, but Looker and Flourish are other good options.
Export the graphics to Figma. There, you can edit headers, footers, colors to make the design on-brand, and arrows pointing to areas you’d like to call attention to.
Write the post that will accompany the graphic and post it on social media. These posts are usually a mix of fact and opinion.
3. Listen to people in your industry.
When you’re starting out, you can get story ideas by listening to sales calls, reading customer success reports, and talking to other founders. The point is to make sure you know what people are interested in talking and reading about, so you can have a better shot of creating stories that will get engagement.
There are two types of stories the Carta team tells:
Ongoing stories (such as how valuations change quarter-to-quarter).
“Newsjacking” stories (as Peter calls them), which jump into a public conversation. For Carta, that can be a debate on X about whether Miami is a good place to found a startup. For a newsjacking story, Peter builds a graphic within the hour and either posts it publicly on social or DMs it to the people having the conversation.
4. Engage with your audience.
Read the comments on your posts. Comments give you a sense of what people are curious about and discussing. They’ll also let you know if you’ve got something incorrect.
“The back and forth in the comments is where a lot of the magic happens.” Comments have become the basis of many of Peter’s posts. He has a Word Doc with 200 questions that can inspire future posts.
Another way to engage with your audience is to DM other thought leaders. Peter will create a graphic and DM it directly to a VC on X with a note saying he hopes it’s useful for them. He says while it’s impossible for him to track this, one sure sign of success is if founders and VCs share his graphics with their peers in private WhatsApp groups. That’s how he knows that he’s got his thumb on the pulse, and is contributing to the conversation.
Tips to make your insights strategy shine
Create content from a human, not a company.
If your primary distribution channel is social media, the algorithms favor humans over companies. Human authors can also take a personal view and engage with others in the comments in a way companies can’t. Peter’s own experience bears this out: While posts on Carta’s LinkedIn page generate dozens of likes, those on Peter’s personal LinkedIn will get thousands of likes.
Writing from an individual’s point of view allows people to establish their own voice. It allows other people to approach individuals with questions and ideas in a way they wouldn’t approach a company.
When hiring a data storyteller, look for passion and curiosity.
When looking to make your first data storytelling hire, you could hire either a marketer who wants to dive into data, or a data scientist who wants to become a storyteller. Whichever one you choose, the main quality to look for is someone who is excited and curious about the industry. For example, if that person doesn’t get the job, they would probably write a personal Substack about it anyways
Stay the course
Be prepared to shout into the void for at least 3-4 months. It’s an inevitable part of the process. Eventually, however, if you keep doing it and get better at it, some of the right people will find your content and you’ll gain traction.
Like many brand-building activities, the vast majority (80-90%) of startups will stop producing content after 3 months. But, according to Peter, 6 months is the minimum amount of time to put out data insights if you’re going to commit to it.
While it may seem like a lot of work, especially at first, data-driven content creation doesn’t have to be hard. The good news is, the more you do it, the easier it will become — a positive flywheel for a marketing practice that can be a really effective tool in building up your credibility and brand.
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