5 Steps To Tell Your Story In A Few Words

At Wick Video, we love beautiful illustrations. We love engaging animation. We love silky smooth voiceovers. But none of these really matter if there isn’t a great story behind everything. A great story is the key to explaining stuff better.

Storytelling is the best way to get people to care about you. Your story doesn’t always need to live inside a video. Maybe you tell your story on the title of your website, or maybe in a tagline on your homepage. But telling your story in just a few words can be tricky, so we made a step-by-step guide to help you out.

1. Simplify What You Do

Your business probably does a ton of different things. For instance, at Wick Video, we write scripts, draw storyboards, design illustrations, create animations, and a handful of other things. But everything we do is under the umbrella of making explainer videos.

Cut to the important stuff. Image source

Before: “A full service animation and live action explainer video studio. We handle everything including script, storyboard, animation, voiceover."

After: “We make explainer videos."

2. Make It Revolve Around Your Audience (Not You)

Our business makes explainer videos. That’s how we make money. But unless you're my mom, you probably don’t care. You want to know how our service can actually help you. So instead of making our story all about Wick Video, we want it to be about the businesses that use our service. How does our service help them?

Think of yourself as Yoda. And think of your audience as Luke Skywalker.

Before: “We make explainer videos"

After: “Increasing conversion rates with explainer videos"

3. Get To The Why

Increasing your conversion rate is definitely a huge reason to get an explainer video. But it doesn’t really explain how or why the conversion rates will go up. And it almost seems too good to be true and might come across too sales-y. So instead let’s dig a little deeper and look at why our clients' conversion rates go up: they have a tool that helps them explain their product better.

Your audience wants to know why. Image source

Before: "Increasing conversion rates with explainer videos"

After: “Explaining stuff better with explainer videos."

4. Simplify It Some More

If someone is on our website, it’s safe to assume they’ll be able to figure out that we make explainer videos. Instead of announcing that we are an explainer video company, let’s stay laser focused on the “Why”.

Keep slicing it. Image source

Before: “Explaining stuff better with explainer videos."

After: “Explaining stuff better."

5. Make It Action Oriented

If your goal is to get people to take action (which it should be), you should use action verbs. This will also help make your story actually revolve around your audience, instead of revolving around you.

Tom Cruise knows all about action. Image source

Before: “Explaining stuff better."

After: “Explain stuff better."

Companies That Tell Great Stories

Here are a few other companies that do a great job of telling their story in just a few words:

Square - Start selling today.

MailChimp - Send better email.

Slack - Be less busy.

Asana - Move work forward.

Squarespace - Build it beautiful.

Know another company that does a great job of telling their story in a few words? Let us know in the comments.