What is a Storyboard and How Can You Use it for Your Business?

They are simple story sketches or key elements that create a visual walk-through of a film or video but are also used today for many other projects, especially in the business and event industry.

And guess what?

You don’t have to be a storyboard artist or production expert to create a useful storyboard for marketing your business. The days of a hand-drawn storyboard are behind us. There are a variety of storyboarding software programs on the market that we will share later in this article, making it a breeze.

A storyboard is a very important tool for video marketing, website design, visual marketing projects, business strategies, or simply to write notes about your production teams' thoughts. You can also use them for a variety of different business endeavors.

Whether you use a storyboard template, storyboard creator, or another storyboarding tool, this creative process isn’t as difficult as you might think. Let's get started.

How can you use storyboarding for your business?

A storyboard or storyboard template isn't just useful in the TV and film industry, creating storyboards can be beneficial for many business teams to implement into their workflow.

Plan marketing videos

Marketing videos are becoming the best way to get your customer's attention and share your story. With the popularity of websites, social media, and YouTube, well-thought-out videos are ideal for entertaining and selling to your viewers.

As a matter of fact, search engines like Google will rank you higher in customer searches when you have videos. Marketing videos are great tools for building and growing your brand by sharing tips about using your products, industry-related helpful information, how-to guides, behind-the-scenes tours, funny outtakes, getting to know the team, testimonials, and so much more.

The ideas are endless for creating content for marketing videos, and storyboarding is the first step to planning for production teams.

Map the user experience for a website

A website that works for you 24/7 is essential for any business today. The user experience or customer journey is crucial to keeping visitors to your website longer and converting them into loyal returning customers.

If you don't catch a customer's attention between 15 and 20 seconds they will lose interest and find some other website to entertain them. Storyboards are helpful for you and your website designer to understand where and how you want your customer to easily access from page to page. This includes where to establish call-to-action links, and buttons, learn more content, and finally take customers to the sales page.

A well-designed mobile-friendly website mapped out before the website is built helps with the overall website design. Keep in mind to add landing page design tips, search engine optimization information, and other instrumental coding requirements.

Storyboarding is an extremely useful tool to develop the backend in order for the user experience to add value, be entertaining, and respond fast.

Plan visual marketing projects

Typically, as entrepreneurs and small business professionals, you are wearing more than one hat in a leadership role.

A storyboard helps you lead and inform your team not only about the project's end goals but keep everyone on schedule during important marketing projects.

This could include new product development and new product launches, scheduling display ads, holiday and special events, sales goals, and strategic planning. It could also include small projects that need to be delegated to other departments that have smaller roles in the big picture.

Whatever the project is, the storyboarding process helps visually plan it out step by step.

Plan projects on business strategies

A storyboard is commonly used by business analysts to get a better understanding of their clients and their business.

They break everything down into sections allowing them to know where they came from, where they are now and where they want to go in the future. It also assists in budgeting, analytics, and setting future goals.

Using storyboarding techniques is a very worthwhile storyboarding process. It can assist you in creating outlines, flowcharts, timelines, and all the expectations of the final project. It makes it a visual tool for everyone on the team to see what it will look like at the very beginning of the project.

A well-drafted storyboard will assist everyone to visually organize their thought process and create a common understanding of the end result and what business strategies it will take to get there.

Organize your thoughts

Organization is key to successful outcomes in any project, from furniture arrangement to larger, more strategic projects.

Writing and putting your thoughts into a storyboard allows you to keep on track and stay organized. Projects of any size usually have many moving parts, and it can become overwhelming if they are not documented.

A storyboard creates a visual for you to use as a dynamic overview of your projects. It also enables you to leave in the middle of a thought and return at a later time. A storyboard is helpful to guide team collaboration, visualize a learning experience, identify missing areas of your design, and make it easy to stay on task and budget.

5 Best storyboard creators

As mentioned earlier, a hand-drawn storyboard is a thing of the past. Take a look at specialized software that is made to make your storyboarding production process so much easier.

Canva

Canva is a very easy-to-use software development program that includes customizable storyboard templates for ideas, stock images, and a feature for you to upload your own photos, videos, and graphics.

It has a wonderful array of features to help guide you in creating grids and organizing your frames while customizing colors, fonts, and just about everything a beginner to an expert could imagine.

The templates are specially sized and optimized for all social media platforms and make it easy to download and share on those platforms as well. Canva offers both free and paid subscriptions. Paid subscriptions provide many more features and special storyboarding templates.

Boards Storyboard Creator

This online storyboarding software program is great for collaborating with multiple people on your team. It is very user-friendly and allows you to add images, add text for notes, and gives you the ability to add action, lighting, sound and camera angles. It is so intuitive you don’t even need to take a tutorial, simply log on and go to work.

makeStoryboard

This is another easy-to-use, intuitive software for creating effective storyboards. Using makeStoryboard features, customers enjoy an array of abilities like easily uploading camera shots and drawing with the built-in drawing tools.

Users can easily write in and record important scene details. makeStoryboard is like an online drawing tablet complete with pencil, pen, and magic marker capabilities to create a step-by-step visual outline of your project.

StoryboardThat

StoryboardThat is another intuitive, easy-to-use tool for those who just don’t want to draw anything, making the production process a breeze. It's easy to do anything from creating a character, background, or any visual graphic.

This is why StoryboardThat is a great choice for anyone, especially novices, to learn how to create a storyboard. There are hundreds of storyboard template ideas that make it extremely easy.

There are between three and six-frame storyboards for the free version, which for some is totally enough. The paid version gives you unlimited access to layouts, storyboards, audio, and more to walk you through the storyboarding production process.

Storyboarder

If you are new to storyboarding and want to quickly visualize your overall idea, Storyboarder is fast and simple to use. This helpful software offers the nuts and bolts drawing tools that are quick, and basic to get you started.

Then, if you want to get more detailed and have the Adobe Suite, this software connects with Photoshop for you to edit, expand and create even more. Storyboarder is great for writers, directors, story artists, and anyone who has an idea that they want to bring to life.

Vyond

If you are interested in creating animation and need software for this reason, Vyond is designed to help you and have fun at the same time. What makes Vyond unique is an automatic lip-sync feature allowing you to directly and easily upload audio and assign it to a character in your animation. Keep in mind there is a free trial, but after that, subscriptions are required.

Email is a great tool for visual marketing

Email marketing is part of an overall marketing strategy. Not only do you have your readers' personal and undivided attention, but they have also signed up to receive messages from your business.

Email is a great tool for visual marketing when you create value-added content to get people talking about your brand. This includes colorful graphics, beautiful photographs, pleasing layouts, and other visually appealing content that complements the message you are conveying.

Mailchimp is an industry leader in email and automated marketing tools. We can help you create emails that are relevant, engage, get more opens and generate more sales. Get started on your free trial today.