How to use storyboarding to create more engaging content

As a creator, trying to find content that you want to create can be quite a challenge. It can feel like what you want to talk about is already out there in so many ways, that you don’t have anything unique to add to the conversation.

I understand the struggle. I know it is real.

Once you have decided on a topic that you’d like to create content around, what is the first thing that you do?

Generally, you write down the topic title and start to think about what you want to say. You might write down a few dot points on the topic. Perhaps you do a bit of research into the idea and start to gain some solid references that you can refer to.

The time that it takes you to get through those first few steps can range wildly depending on how much research you do, and how wide the topic is. After that stage is complete, you setup your recording space, hit the record button and away you go.

You look through your dot points as you go, refer to your references and you feel like you’ve done a pretty damn good job.

And you probably have.

But did you engage your audience all the way through?

Did you provide the value that you were hoping to?

Is there enough content here with context that you can pull multiple smaller snippets out of to spread your content further?

If you think about that, maybe it hasn’t quite hit the mark, and that’s okay! I have an idea for you that will help you create more engaging content, that can be repurposed in more ways.

Welcome to the world of storyboarding.

A storyboard is used most frequently in the film and television industry. A storyboard is generally quite detailed, but for the purpose of your content creation, it doesn’t need to be.

The main areas I recommend you focus on in your storyboard creation are:

Introduction - introduce the listener/viewer to the topic
Relatable Story - This could be a “case study” that relates to the topic, a personal story, an article you read (etc). The key here is to make it a story that the listener/viewer can easily understand. But, DON’T resolve the story. Make sure that you leave the audience wondering.
Action Steps - Your content could then be broken down into multiple action steps. This is the area of your content where your audience is learning something/diving deeper into something and they’re receiving value from you as a content creator
Resolve the Story - Go back to the story that you mentioned at the beginning of the episode. Was there a resolution? Some way that can tie it all up into a nice little bow?
Conclude & CTA - Think about ONE thing that you want your audience to do after listening to this content. Make an impactful action statement here without muddying it up with a bunch of options. It could be as simple as, “have a lovely day”.

If you spend a little longer in your planning stage, I can guarantee that you’ll be able to pull out more impactful snippets from your content.

Treat your Action Steps like “silos” of content within the broader topic and you’ll be able to create three times more usable content from the one piece.

If you would like help structuring your content, book a 90min content planning session below.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Brianna: Today I am talking about content planning. When you become a client through us, Bamby Media, we provide everyone with a production schedule. This is essentially a big spreadsheet where you can map out or at least put in titles for topic ideas that you have and when you wanna release those, and any particular notes that might be relevant to that topic.
[00:00:31] And for a lot of people that can be pretty much as far as the actual content planning goes. But the issue with this is that you haven't spent enough time in that planning stage to go "why is someone listening to my content?" You have an idea for a topic, you have a sense of what you wanna say, and then you just record.
[00:00:54] This is where a producer or someone, maybe it's you, maybe it's a va, someone for that works for you, or a content producer, can step in and take that topic from a topic, this is the idea, to how am I actually going to verbalise and visualise this content into something that someone will want to listen to or watch all the way through.
[00:01:19] This is what's known as a storyboard. It's something that is used in film and TV and audio production all the time. the main thing is to map out where the key points or what the journey is for a particular topic that you have in mind. If we think about that from a storyboarded idea, if you take the topic that you're interested in, you go, "right, okay. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually storyboard this out to turn it into something that is more of a concept than just what I think I should talk about." The storyboard will involve actually sitting down and using like a piece of paper or an iPad or whatever, something that you can draw with .
[00:02:03] Like, here we go. I've got a pen. Uh, and you map it out. So within that, you map out what will always be an introduction to the topic. For me personally right now, this is getting a bit better for you perhaps, but I've introduced what the topic is today. I introduced that it was going to be a conversation about content planning.
[00:02:25] The next part of that storyboard should always be, okay, what's the story, the case study, the example of when that topic was used or had to be thought about? And again, for me, just then before I mentioned that all our clients get a production schedule and then within that schedule, blah, blah, blah.
[00:02:46] So I mentioned what was the use case for that topic and how far that kind of planning went. So you tell a story, Hey, this happened to me when. Something that is relatable, something that makes sense to the person listening to it, and they can go, yeah, okay, that makes sense to me, or, I've had that thing happen, or they're interested in it because it's a compelling story.
[00:03:08] But the thing I want you to do is not resolve the story. The next thing I want you to do is , then perhaps you have an action step, something that the person listening can then do. So they've listened to the intro, they've listened to what the story is, they're not sure what the outcome of that story is yet, and then they've been told, Hey, this is the first step that you can take to do X, Y, Z.
[00:03:32] One would be to actually write down, in my case, I've said to you, write down and have a content plan. Get a pen, get a storyboard going and plan it out. So that's action one.
[00:03:43] You've talked about what it is and how to actually proactively do that. What do you need to be able to do the thing? Who else is gonna need to be involved? All that sort of thing. Then you've got action two, which would be something else that someone could do in this process.
[00:03:59] So let's say they're trying to get better at meditating. That could be the topic that you're wanting to talk to them about. Action two could be once they've found a really nice quiet space, then perhaps it could be finding the right music that is going to help them on their, you know, meditation journey.
[00:04:18] Or if music doesn't work for someone, it might be in the form of putting in some headphones where that blocks out all other noise and they can just soak up the, whatever, you know, soak up getting into that actual space. So that could be the topic two. And then topic three would be something else. So do you see what I'm doing here?
[00:04:38] I'm going, okay. Well, this is an action one. This is action two, and this is action three. This is things that people can actually use that relate to the story that you told and the topic that you are trying to address. Once you have three actions, what you also have is three smaller versions of this content piece that you're creating that you can then go, whoop.
[00:05:08] That's gonna be a five minute bit for YouTube. Whoop, that's gonna be a five minute bit for YouTube. Whoop, that's gonna be a five minute bit for YouTube. What you are doing is creating not only a long episode or content, you know, video, whatever it is that you're doing, not only the long piece but you've then got actions, you've got silos within that content that you can pull out and create bigger, five-ish minute, maybe less, versions that are useful and standalone. That is so helpful because it's taking in a layer deeper for you than going, okay, this is my episode. Hopefully there's some cool snippets that I can pull out of that, or that my content team can pull out of it.
[00:05:53] It's going, oh, I have these silos within my episode that someone can actually use on their own. Then there's things where you go into how you title those things and all that sort of aspect, but at least you have those silos of standalone content. Once you've done that, you feel like you've provided enough value within that one content piece, that one topic, then you come back to the story and you resolve it. that then ties together the whole concept. And it's been valuable from start to finish. Because the problem that I see all the time is that the value isn't there all the way through.
[00:06:38] In fact, what you discussed, you could have said in 10 minutes or less, but you've repeated yourself, you've rambled, you've whatever. You haven't had a content plan, you haven't storyboarded it out properly, and so it's not really valuable all the way through. So whether it is in this space of having actionable steps, whether it's a step-by-step process, or whether it's just a story overall, whatever you have planned as a content episode, as a topic, you've gotta have those key points within the content that you can pull out and silo on their own.
[00:07:18] So when you're thinking about content planning, you should think more broadly than "here is my topic", and I'm just gonna talk about it now for 15 minutes, 20 minutes. It's, "what are my action points or my silos that I can talk about that would be standalones?" If you don't do some form of storyboarding, some form of like, is this boring?
[00:07:46] When at what point does this get boring For me listening and for me watching and for me actually delivering the content? When do I start to feel like I'm just going back over something I already said? And at that point, you have to Pull the rip record and go, okay, that's, that's enough. I've done enough. And make sure that you have created a storyboard that you feel connected to from beginning to end.
[00:08:16] Because if you feel connected to it, the listener, the watcher is gonna feel connected to it too. Now there's a bunch of different things that you then go to go further, like the kind of titles that you give things. If it's something for YouTube, what's your thumbnail gonna look like? What are your show notes gonna say?
[00:08:34] There's all these other things and aspects that come from that, but the first step is always the content and the storyboard within that content. If you want help with this kind of thing, then we do have a content planning consultation, which is just me looking at and reviewing the content that you have already, that you've released and auditing you and kind of going, this was good, but this wasn't so great.
[00:09:00] This is what you could have done to make this episode better. What else have you got coming up? And then we can go through and actually storyboard a few episodes out so that then you can feel like, oh, okay. You get in the rhythm of what it actually means to create a proper storyboard that someone would actually want to listen to or watch all the way through.
[00:09:18] Get to thinking about more broadly what your content is doing, who it's serving, and storyboard it out. And I promise you, you are going to have content that is going to connect with more people, hit home better, and actually create more content for you in less time.