You’ve heard it a million times: storytelling makes information engaging and memorable. But did you know that using video to tell the right stories effectively can actually help you grow your business?
In this post, we’ll discuss 8 video stories you can tell to generate revenue, raise capital, retain employees, and get everyone moving in the same direction.
1
Explainer Videos
Create a video that:
- Shows potential customers that you understand the problem they face
- Explains how you can solve it for them
The most effective videos tell the story of someone (your ideal customer) who has a problem. With the help of your product or service, they find the solution they need for a better life.
How this video story can grow your business
Creating an explainer video that tells a story can generate income for your business. How? Stories spark emotion. And emotions drive our decisions, including the decision to purchase a solution like yours.
2
Success Story Videos
A success story—or case study—tells the story of how an actual customer has achieved success thanks to your brand.
The story follows a before-and-after structure that details:
- the challenge the customer found themselves in,
- the way they used your product or service, and
- the benefits they experienced as a result
How this video story can grow your business
Success stories provide social proof and help validate your prospects’ decision to purchase. As a result, success stories can be tremendously effective at increasing your conversion rate.
3
Origin Story Videos
Share the story of how your company came to be, including:
- the events and any aha moments that led to its inception
- the milestones that shaped its history
You’ll get plenty of mileage out of your origin story video, which you can use to kick off sales meetings and keynote presentations or to build into your onboarding of new employees.
How this video story can grow your business
Origin stories humanize your brand. If you get it right, your origin story can help you:
- Create an emotional connection to your customers, employees, and partners
- Earn their trust
- Inspire confidence
… all important factors in the growth of any business.
4
Company Values Videos
The exercise of declaring our company’s vision, mission statement and corporate values is a common one.
The results of the exercise usually occupy a spot in the employee handbook or a hidden corner of the corporate website.
But there are more engaging ways to share your values than to record them with empty-sounding words.
Bring them to life in video stories about employees who are living the values with their choices and actions.
How this video story can grow your business
There are good reasons for your company to share your values loudly and proudly. For instance:
- customers are drawn to companies that espouse their values
- clarity around your company values can inspire your employees and give them a sense of belonging.
Create an emotional connection with your key stakeholders
Find out which eight organizational stories you can tell to emotionally connect with your key stakeholders, inspire them, and motivate them to act.
5
Business Strategy Video
Use video to share your company’s strategic plans with your employees and/or investors.
Strategic overview presentations can be dry, boring, and entirely forgettable.
And yet, a strategic plan has all the makings of a compelling redemption story:
- Everything has been good
- But now there’s a problem
- We have a plan to address it
- We will emerge better than ever
Turn your strategic plan into an engaging video story that you can share with employees and investors, near and far,
How this video story can grow your business
This one has loads of benefits:
- Promote alignment of resources
- Empower employees to make decisions that take the company in the right direction
- Makes organizational shifts more speedily
- Communicate your plans to investors and the board in a way that keeps them engaged and inspires confidence.
6
Employee Onboarding Videos
Create video stories to facilitate your employee onboarding process and help them quickly understand:
- The roles and responsibilities of different departments
- How they interact to serve your customers’ needs
- The different systems your employees will be using and where they can find further information.
Make the information more engaging and memorable by presenting it as an “a day in the life of an employee” story.
How this video story can grow your business
Getting new employees up and running more quickly and feeling connected to your company can help you reduce employee turnover.
7
Compliance Videos
Create videos to train your employees on actions they should take or avoid to protect your company from liability.
Where do the video stories fit in? Use role-playing scenarios to help employees understand the right actions to take in different situations, and to do so in engaging ways.
How this video story can grow your business
In one word: protection.
Effective compliance training keeps your reputation intact by reducing the risk of fraud, discrimination, corruption and unforced errors that put your company at risk.
8
Investor Pitch Video
Having a solid investor pitch can help you win over investors and secure capital for your business. There are many ways for you to shape your pitch into a video story. For example, you can:
- Share the story of why and how you chose to start this business
- Tell the customer’s story of transformation, before and after your solution
- Tell an industry story that sheds light on the gap you’re filling that competitors can’t
- Paint a picture of what you will do with their funds to achieve growth
How this video story can grow your business
A short-and-sweet video story can capture the attention of investors and earn you access to their funds.
Why video storytelling?
There are many ways to tell your business stories. You could speak at events, design presentations, and speak on podcasts… just to name a few tactics.
Why, then, would you choose to do your storytelling with video?
Video storytelling offers many singular benefits. Here are a few.
Video serves up a powerful combination of motion, text, visuals and audio, making video storytelling extremely engaging.
Video is helpful for synchronous and asynchronous communication. For example, you can:
- Send your video by email (asynchronous)
- Display it on your website (asynchronous)
- Embed it in your presentations (synchronous)
- Play it at events (asynchronous)
Video works in person and remotely. In an increasingly hybrid workplace, it’s hard to miss the advantage that video can be accessed and self-served from anywhere.
Video ensures consistency of presentation. Compared to presentations, where the information may be presented differently by each presenter, video stories ensure that:
- All essential information gets airplay.
- Your message is presented in a consistent way across your organization.
Whiteboard videos: your best option for video storytelling
Whiteboard animation is even more effective for business storytelling than talking head videos. Compared to talking-head videos, research from University of Hertfordshire’s Professor Richard Wiseman shows that whiteboard videos:
- Are rated as 33% more entertaining
- Deliver a 15% higher recall rate
- Are 66% more likely to be shared
And these are just a few of the benefits of whiteboard videos are endless. If you need more convincing, check out the eye-popping whiteboard animation statistics that resulted from a third-party study of our own videos.
Over To You
Are you harnessing the power of stories to grow your business? Are you telling those stories with video? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Need help creating your animated video story? We specialize in award-winning whiteboard animation and we’d love to help. Please contact us for a personalized quote, and be sure to check out more of the whiteboard animation examples in our portfolio.
And if you’ve enjoyed this post, please sign up to our email list to be alerted when our next post is published.
