How To Use Video Storytelling In Your Marketing Campaigns

Video storytelling has the power to transform businesses by elevating their marketing to new heights.

Storytelling forges a deep bond between you and your audience.

One that allows brands to create content that emotionally resonates with their customers and transforms them into passionate brand advocates.

The growing popularity of story-led marketing is clear from the fact that:

But what does “storytelling” actually look like in practice? And how do you create storytelling videos that audiences will love? What’s the process of storytelling video production?

Hancock Animations provides an online video storytelling app that’s helped more than +350 happy customers to turn their bright new ideas into stunning videos, so we feel pretty well-placed to answer those questions!

Ready? Then let’s get into it…

What Is Video Storytelling?

Video storytelling is the process of crafting an original story to demonstrate the value of your products and to make your marketing message easier to understand.

Stories are proven to keep consumers engaged and be more memorable than other content formats, making video storytelling a powerful marketing asset for your brand.

Rather than sounding like a sales pitch, video storytelling uses a clear narrative to describe the viewer’s pain points and offer a clear solution. This creates an emotional response in the viewer that compels them to take action.

Storytelling Frameworks To Apply To Your Marketing Videos

● Three-Act Product Videos

● The Pixar Framework

● The 5-Step Business Story Framework

Creating a video-telling story doesn’t need to be difficult.

Many of your favorite movies or shows typically choose a storytelling framework and use that template to storyboard their content.

From there, all they do is swap out their characters and plot points to fit the story they want to tell.

You can apply this exact same technique to your marketing content to ensure that you create emotionally responsive videos every time.

Before we explain popular storytelling frameworks, it’s important that we quickly cover some universal principles around corporate storytelling:

Every story involves a journey in which your character starts in one predicament, and finishes in another (typically their happy-ever-after)

All stories need to have stakes or conflict to keep your watchers engaged

Your customer is the hero of your story, not your business

These principles are non-negotiable and must feature in your videos to achieve the marketing goal of your video.

Now let’s take a look at how to apply them within popular storytelling frameworks.

Framework 1 — Three-Act Product Videos

● Act One — Establish Customer Pain Points

● Act Two — The Solution (Your Product Or Service)

● Act Three — Call Your Viewer To Action

Applying a simple three-act structure to your product marketing videos makes it easy to transform them from boring overly-promotional videos, to engaging stories that make customers understand why they need to buy your product right away.

The three-act structure makes storytelling easy because it splits your content into three distinct sections during the storyboarding phase.

This simplifies the hero’s journey of your story into a start, middle, and end. Easy right?

Here’s how to use video storytelling to sell your products.

Act One — Establish Customer Pain Points

In the first act of your product video, you need to display empathy to your target audience by acknowledging that you understand the difficulties they’re currently facing.

You do this by explaining or displaying their current problems and elaborating on how it’s affecting their current quality of life (i.e. the stakes of the story).

If you don’t know your customer’s pain points then you need to ask yourself what problems your product/services solve and then reverse engineer them from there.

Remember, your customer is the hero of this story. They need to be able to see themselves on screen.

The goal is for your customer to think “wow, it’s like this video was made just for me. This is exactly what I’m going through.”

Achieve this and you’ve already succeeded in triggering an emotional response in your viewer.

Act Two — The Solution (Your Product Or Service)

Now that you’ve drawn the viewer into your story, it’s time to progress their journey and move them towards their happily-ever-after.

Act two is where you build demand for your product because you frame it as the solution to all the problems your hero is encountering in act one.

It’s crucial that your whole second act talks about how your product works and gives the viewer a plan to solve their problems

The concept that you need to understand here is the dream outcome.

All consumers purchase a product hoping to achieve a dream outcome, if you can convince your customer that your product will achieve their dream outcome, they’re much more likely to buy it.

For example, gym memberships. The dream outcome of gym customers isn’t to access exercise equipment. It’s to achieve a fit, healthy body, and increased self-confidence.

To put it simply: you need to promise the watcher that buying your product will lead to their dream outcome in your video.

Act Three — Call Your Viewer To Action

The final part of your video is to close the sale by calling your viewer to action.

Here you need to tell them precisely what you want them to do next. If you want them to buy your product then tell the viewer how they can do that and where it’s available.

Don’t leave anything to chance or assume that the viewer will intuitively know what to do after watching your video.

Just because it may be obvious to you, doesn’t mean it will be to the viewer. Be as descriptive as possible and you’ll achieve a much higher ROI on your marketing videos.

Framework 2 — The Pixar Framework

Beloved animation studio Pixar is famous for a number of hit movies that pull on the heartstrings. (How anyone can watch Up with dry eyes is beyond me.)

However, by and large they all follow the same 6-part framework to tell their stories:

● Once upon a time…

● Every day…

● One day…

● Because of that…

● Because of that…

● Until finally…

Here’s an example:

Once upon a time, there was a widowed fish named Marlin who was extremely protective of his only son, Nemo.

Every day, Marlin warned Nemo of the ocean’s dangers and implored him not to swim far away.

One day, in an act of defiance, Nemo ignores his father’s warnings and swims into the open water.

Because of that, he is captured by a diver and ends up as a pet in the fish tank of a dentist in Sydney.

Because of that, Marlin sets off on a journey to recover Nemo, enlisting the help of other sea creatures along the way.

Until finally, Marlin and Nemo find each other, reunite, and learn that love depends on trust.

If you want to give your marketing videos the Pixar treatment and emotionally gut-punch your audience, you can do so by writing these 6 stages into your video script and storyboard.

In this framework, the first 4 parts are really hammering home your customer’s pain points, the consequences of them, and the emotional impact it’s having on them.

The final 2 sections, need to introduce your product as the big idea that begins to spark positive change. And finally, end with your customer’s dream outcome.

Framework 3 — The 5-Step Business Story Framework

Slightly different from the previous two examples, The 5-Step Business Story Framework is used more for creating compelling social media content that entertains and educates your audience.

It’s a storytelling framework to grow your brand awareness and inspire your audience as opposed to immediately selling them on your products.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Dive into the Action — don’t waste time over explaining the background of your story. Begin it at the most interesting peak and you’ll hook people from the very start.

Step 2: Develop with Details — establish an emotional connection, let them know how it felt in the moment, tug on the viewer’s empathy.

Step 3: Build Tension — introduce the stakes. What will you lose if you don’t solve the issue?

Step 4: Share the Shift — engaging stories need a shift in tone, they need conflict resolution and a happy ending. This is the part of the story where you turn things around and explain how you did it.

Step 5: Connect the Dots — your story doesn’t end here because you solved the problem. Now’s the time to refocus your audience and summarize the moral of your story. A great tip to grab your viewer’s attention is to start this section with the phrase: ‘I share this story because…’

This type of corporate storytelling has exploded on LinkedIn in recent times. Take advantage of it to grow your organic following across your social media channels with heartfelt accounts of your brand’s journey.

Final Thoughts

A good story is a whole lot more impactful than a content marketing strategy which simply pushes “features and benefits” product videos.

But it’s also a whole lot harder to pull off.

Anyone can list the key features of their product or service. Most can do it in a way that speaks to common pain points. But far fewer can spark emotion from viewers by telling a compelling story with a start, middle, and end.

However, Hancock Animations makes the process a whole lot simpler by giving you all the resources you need to start telling engaging stories right now.