Let's create a sample storyboard with Imra at Calla and Ivy to help her plan out a new Instagram story. The first thing to determine when starting to storyboard is our engagement goal for our social media post. Do we want to educate our audience? Do we want to increase traffic to our website, or do we want to make a sale? Also, what story are we going to tell? So for this storyboard, we're going to have education, inspiration, and purchase in mind. For our story, we're going to show how Imra creates a flower bouquet. There are tools and apps out there, but for our storyboard, we're going to use a plain sheet of paper. Let's make our boxes or panels. Since we're designing for Instagram stories, we'll make our panels rectangular to mimic the phone screen. Since we want to tell a story here, let's title our boxes with steps we want to include from choosing a flower color scheme to arranging and wrapping up the stems. Imra typically starts her process by deciding on a color scheme for her bouquet. Then she reflects on what's in season. Then she goes to the flower markets, and examines the selection, and chooses the flowers that will work for her bouquet. She then cuts the stems just right, arranges them in a bouquet, adds a few more stems for effect, and then she wraps up the stems. We have a great story arc here, but we want to make sure we include an opening block with a title and setup to let our audience know what they're about to see. Let's add that panel at the beginning. We also want to have a call to action after the bouquet has been created, which will be something like buy this bouquet today, or discover more bouquets. Let's add another panel onto the end that will be our call to action, and which will contain a link to our website. Let's start sketching out the panels for our storyboard, so we can see visually what our Instagram story is going to look like. Already, we can see that some of the panels looks similar to others. Since our Instagram story already feels long, having nine boxes means our followers have to watch nine different segments. Let's cut a few. Originally, we were thinking of just having static images, but now that we're laying out our storyboard, it may be more engaging to have them be short videos. Because we know what we want in each video, it will be much easier to film once we start. Maybe you want to include some voice-over to the videos. We can start drafting the script in our storyboard as well. Actually in remembering that most videos are playing without sound, not having a voice-over is probably good idea. Let's make text to go in the video instead. In addition to the text, we want to add some stickers on those videos. So let's include that in our storyboard as well, so we don't forget. Let's add our logo in the bottom right corner of each video too. Let's make sure that we're not going to miss anything in our closing panel. So let's include any hashtags we want to include, draft our call to action language, and make sure we have the right link. Our storyboard is complete, meaning we not only have a detailed outline now for our Instagram story, we've been thoughtful in our approach to creating this content. It's going to be unique, educational, and eye-catching. We'll hopefully get our audience to click through to check out more of Calla and Ivy. As you can see from the exercise, there are great benefits to storyboarding your content before you post it. First, it allows you to brainstorm and think of good ideas before you commit them to video. If something's not working, or if you need to rearrange sections, you can do so easily. Also, storyboarding helps you flesh out new ideas that haven't fully formed yet. Because social media is so visual, storyboarding allows you to picture what your content will look like, and how it will present before you start creating it. By planning out your content with the storyboard, you're committing to creating deliberate, thoughtful, well-put-together work that your audience will notice. If you begin to be recognized for your excellent content, you'll build trust and gain followers. Storyboarding is also a way to capture tiny elements you may forget when posting on the fly, like stickers you want to add hashtags, location tags, mentions, and others. If you have multiple people working on your business's social media, storyboarding is a way to make sure everyone is on the same page. If you need to pitch social media stories to a marketing director or editor, it's also a great way to show them visually what you're thinking about. Finally you can turn storyboards into templates for future content. So you're not starting from the ground up each time. As a social media manager, knowing different ways to create fresh professional content is key, and storyboarding is sure to be one of the most helpful tools in your toolbox.
