How to Tell Your Product’s Story in Compelling Visuals: Advice for Startups on a Budget

You might have heard that content is the king, and videos work best for catching the attention of the audience – and that’s very true for product-led companies, including startups. Videos can be worth a thousand words when it comes to explaining the concept of a product, illustrating its typical use cases and building a compelling brand narrative. They can be made short, catchy, emotional and even viral (if you get really lucky!).

Some reasons to consider investing in video content for your startup

✅ If you are an early-stage startup and your product prototype is still in development, a video explaining your product’s use case and features can complement your pitch deck and catch the attention of potential investors

✅ If you exhibit at trade shows and tech conferences for startups (such as WebSummit, Collision and others), playing a product video on your screen will guarantee you more people stopping by your booth to learn more

✅ Putting a video reflecting your company’s mission and products on your website and social media channels will help your potential clients and partners instantly get the idea of what the value of your innovation is

✅ A video is a great way to showcase your team – it’s always great to see the faces behind the brand, and in a startup, a team plays a major role in gaining credibility from investors

✅ Short explainer videos for social media help raise awareness about the issues you are tackling and help your audience learn more about how your product deals with them

How to Make Video Content on a Startup Budget

The problem with videos is that they can often be either really expensive or utterly complicated to make. The easiest way to have them produced is to hire a marketing agency and trust them to figure things out for you. Obviously, the more content you want and the higher quality you expect, the more it will cost – a professional 2-3 minute long video with original footage, professional color correction and graphics will cost anything from $10.000. If you are looking for professional cinematic quality and original concepts resembling those viral videos of Coca-Cola and Nike, multiply these figures by a few times.

Now, if your startup is still working its way towards financial profitability, you may wonder if there is a way for you to benefit from multimedia content without having to splash the cash.

Bad news: no content is free. The less money you are willing to spend, the more time – yours or your team’s – you’ll have to invest.

Good news: there are different ways to produce outstanding video content for a very reasonable cost.

Here are some ways to approach this task.

Stock Videos + Simple Graphics: Complete DIY

This may be the easiest and cheapest way to produce video content by yourself. What you really need to put some effort into is writing a sharp, punchy script for one minute or slightly more. Write in short, clear, and concise sentences that are easy to read – site your script out loud to make sure it works. Don’t forget to underline the key messages (e.g. mission statement, main features, figures) – they’ll be your most important graphic titles.

Next, put the script into a table of two columns: one for the lines and the other one for the visuals. Decide which visuals you’ll need to illustrate your script: should there be people with smartphones? Families enjoying their time out in the park? Patients receiving treatment in the hospital? Once you’re clear with the visuals, start searching for them in video stock repositories: Shutterstock, Adobe, MixKit – there are tons of them out there, so you’ll most likely find what you’re looking for.

Once you’re done gathering your footage, use any video editor of your choice to put it together with the titles. You can even use ready-made templates for ads and explainers – some free online editors like Fastreel or Kapwing offer you this option.

Stick to your brand book colors and fonts to keep your content consistent in style. Whenever it’s not possible, opt for simple minimalistic fonts and backgrounds.

Assembling videos from stock footage can be particularly handy when your product is aimed at a sensitive industry such as healthcare: filming real patients is always a challenge and an ethical dilemma. A video like this can be easily assembled from stock material:

Make an Animated Product Video

Animated videos are one of the most fun and engaging ways to describe your products and provide clear use case illustrations. However, producing quality animation may be very costly – unless you know a couple of alternative ways to handle it.

First, it’s worth starting with writing a script – in a similar way as you would do for a simple DYI video. However, you can definitely be more creative in the visuals’ description – with the power of animation, you can picture almost anything.

Next, here comes the realization.

One option is to use programs for making your own animation with various readily available instruments like Vyond or Animaker. You can build your own characters and scenes, and animate them the way you like: make them do different activities, add speech bubbles to create dialogues, and so on. The drawback of this approach is that it will take you quite some time to do it all by yourself – remember you’ll have to take care of each character, the setting around them and their movement! Besides, you will be limited by the animation styles offered by the platform – and they definitely won’t be original, as these programs are available to everyone. You might end up seeing similar characters in someone else’s product videos. So it might not be an optimal way to make major product presentation videos – but with explainer videos for your customers, this instrument will work just fine.

Here’s a sample of what you can do with Vyond:

The other option is to hire a professional animator or a studio. All of them charge differently, so it’s worth asking around for recommendations and talking to different contractors before making a choice. Mind that the cheapest service doesn’t guarantee decent quality, so always ask for portfolio examples and see if this contractor’s animation styles resonate with you. One of the best ways to gather a reasonable number of options is to ask for advice on LinkedIn with relevant tags (such as #animation): eventually, you should end up with a good dozen of offers. Don’t be afraid to negotiate the price and clearly articulate your limits: sometimes even prestigious studios working with big international clients can do huge discounts – just because they liked your project.

Off to practical examples: this video was done by a British studio working with major international clients like Gucci and Papa John’s for an exceptionally startup-friendly check. It was used as a substitute for a non-existent product demo at the WebSummit conference, and caught the attention of big pharma players including AstraZeneca and Roche:

Make a Cinematic Product Video

Compelling storytelling video pieces often constitute the core of marketing campaigns by world-famous brands like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and so on. And while you may not be able to afford something similar on a startup budget, you can still aim for producing something powerful and thought-provoking.

Ideally, you should be able to draft a description of the story you want to project in your video, or even a basic storyboard reflecting how exactly your product will appear in it and what role it will be playing in the characters’ lives. If you are struggling to come up with something usable, write down a few detailed use case scenarios. One of them could serve as a story for your script. Or you can even mix and match a few of them. Or just leave them for someone more professional to come up with a more creative solution – let’s move on to finding them.

Next, you need someone to shoot and edit your story. Unless you have some confident skills in video production, it’s best to ask someone professional to help you with it – yes, smartphone videography is a thing, but you still need an eye for that. Hiring a full-cycle production studio will cost you an arm and a leg, but you don’t necessarily need one. First, search through local film school communities to see if you can find students looking for practice projects: you might find affordable options there. Quite often they are allowed to use their university filming equipment for free or for reasonable money, so you’ll be able to save on that, too.

Another option is, again, to ask around for recommendations and post on social media. You might find indie enthusiasts who would be willing to help you out with the project within your budget – and the end result may look very professional!

Don’t be shy to ask around for help: get your friends and colleagues to star in the video, borrow the things you need or buy them used, and try to arrange your filming locations for free. Remember that it’s delegating that costs. If you can do most of the things by yourself – find the venues, cast the actors (if you need them), assist the camera person, hold the lights – you will significantly cut the check of your production.

For example, this video cost under $5000 in total:

Summary: a Checklist for Your Startup Videos

Here is a simple checklist that you can go over every time you’re thinking of adding some video content to your promo materials.

Step 1. Identify your need.

Decide why you want to make a video, which platforms it will go on, and what is the expected outcome that you’re trying to achieve. Are you targeting community engagement, sales leads, investment opportunities, or something else? Is the video the right type of content for achieving this effect? If yes, move on to the next step.

Step 2. Decide on the budget range.

Figure out your financial limits to define what you can and cannot afford. A target budget would also make it easier for you to negotiate the price with the specialists you’d be considering for the project.

Step 3. Draft a project description.

The more precise you make it, the easier it is to estimate the costs and picture the result you are expecting. Get your team’s feedback before moving on.

Step 4. Ask for recommendations.

It’s always safer to work with someone who has done a great service to people you know. If you are making the video by yourself, there’s no harm in asking around for software advice.

Step 5. Specify the tasks.

Have thorough chats with your potential animators or video makers to make sure you are on the same page, outline the details of the tasks and define your agreements. If you are the editor, make sure it has been signed off by all founders.

Step 6. Push the project into production.

Prepare everything that’s needed from your side – product images and screen captures, logos, locations, actors – whatever your project requires.

Step 7. Control.

It doesn’t matter if you are doing everything by yourself or have a team making the video for you – to ensure the best result, you need to constantly oversee what is being done and give (or receive and apply) feedback.

Step 8. Sign off.

Once you are happy with the result, get your team to review it and apply the final changes.

Done! Now you can show your product video to the world, showcase it at tech events, and send it to your potential investors. Fingers crossed it will be worth the effort!