Brizy Web Stories for Engaging Visual Storytelling: How to Get Started

on 21 Feb 2024, by Veronica, in Blog, WordPress, Cloud, Guides

by Veronica

Want to grab your audience’s attention and easily engage them with digestible content in the shortest amount of time possible?

If this is you, then this guide is for you.

Visual storytelling changes the way you interact, engage, introduce your business, and share your skills and content with your audience. With the right storytelling tool, you can turn visual storytelling into a powerful strategy for marketing yourself, converting prospects, and becoming successful.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to get started using Brizy Web Stories and create engaging visual web stories. We’ll cover:

What web stories are
Reasons why your business should use web stories
How to get started with Brizy Web Stories

Let’s begin!

What are Web Stories?

Web stories are web-based versions of visual storytelling format or sharing information and content with your audience. These stories let you create visual narratives, product showcases, mobile landing pages, onboarding presentations, promotions and discounts, guides, or anything that works great in steps.

By design, a web story is a short, bite-sized content. It consists of multiple slides (or stories) chained together to create an engaging narrative about you, your business or brand, products or services. These slides are usually a mix of visual content such as images, animations, videos, or brief texts which make your stories offer fully immersive storytelling experiences to your audience.

Users can slide from one slide of content to the next by tapping or swiping on their smartphones or desktops.

The short and focused nature of web stories is intentional. This approach lets you cater to the preferences of modern online audiences who often prefer quick and visually appealing content.

Additionally, web stories are designed to be easily consumed and digested, making them ideal for users on the go or those browsing on mobile devices. This mobile-first design also enables content creators to convey information swiftly, whether it's showcasing products, sharing updates, or telling a compelling story.

Let’s have a look at some of the reasons your business might want to use web stories.

Reasons why your business should use web stories

Anyone, particularly marketers, shop owners, content creators, news outlets, and freelancers can use web stories to do the following:

Share compelling visual stories

Storytelling is a valuable form of marketing. It can help you win over customers and their loyalty and enhance your brand identity and recognition. Telling your stories visually using videos, images, presentations, infographics, and even text, etc brings your stories to life.

It makes your stories enticing, inviting, engaging, and convincing. For instance, if you're an artist who wants to showcase your portfolio, you can organize your web story to follow your artistic journey chronologically, from early works to recent masterpieces. Then sell them to your prospects.

Even chefs, freelancers, travel bloggers—anyone—can sell their stories to customers using web stories and convert them. You can share a story about your brand, business, what you do, what you offer, what your business is all about, your resume, and so on.

Promote your business

Part of promoting your business involves content marketing, creating events, and offering discounts, promotional deals, exclusive offers, or loyalty programs. With web stories, you can promote your business in several ways as follows:

Showcase your products or services: For example, you can create a web story showcasing the features and benefits of your new smartphone model, including stunning visuals and a brief demo.

Promote an upcoming event: the web story can feature event details, schedules, speaker profiles, contact info (if any), and ticket information in a visually engaging format.

Share exclusive offers, deals, and promotions: Share a time-limited web story announcing a flash sale with an exclusive discount code, that will grab your customers’ attention and lead them to purchase.
Share your business's milestones: e.g., you can celebrate your company's 10th anniversary with a web story that reflects on key achievements, growth, and the journey that led to this milestone.
Source user-generated content: to build trust and inspire shoppers’ purchasing decisions. These are usually cost-effective and can help you express gratitude for customer support and involvement with your brand.

Enhance user engagement

The visually appealing and interactive nature of web stories encourages users to engage with your content actively. When users tap or click through the slides, they normally invest their time and attention. This increases their likelihood of taking desired actions like signing up for your newsletters or making purchases.

Generally, web stories are also designed to cater to audiences with shorter attention spans by presenting content in a direct and visually engaging manner. Digital marketers can leverage this to quickly grab the attention of users and share promotional content within a short time.

Perfect for product teasers

Product teaser campaigns are a way to create excitement for your upcoming product launch. It's a marketing strategy where you only share a little information about your new offer.

Essentially, this small sneak peek generates curiosity and suspense among your audience and prospective customers before the big launch arrives. The purpose is to get people talking about your brand and increase awareness leading to the final launch. Web stories work great for teaser campaigns because they're short and usually give out little info.

Using web stories for product teaser campaigns can also boost engagement by asking for feedback from your audience.

Web stories offer endless opportunities to take your business to the next level and make you successful. We want this for you! So, if you’re ready, let’s have a look at how you can create your first web story with Brizy Web Stories.

How to get started with Brizy Web Stories

To create, edit, and customize a web story of your own, you require the help of a dedicated plugin, Brizy Web Stories. Brizy Web Stories lets you create various web stories just how you like it, and reap all the benefits we’ve discussed above.

Before we can build one for ourselves, let’s begin with what Brizy Web Stories is.

Create engaging stories with Brizy Web Stories

Brizy Web Stories is a robust builder that enables you to create your own web stories and host them. This plugin lets you build any type of web story you choose depending on the message you want to convey and your creative needs.

Getting started isn’t complicated. Once you’ve logged in to Brizy Cloud or the WordPress version, you can drag and drop to edit, customize, and upload visual content such as images and videos to create short, clear, and visually compelling stories. The following are some of the benefits of using Brizy Web Stories for visual storytelling:

Access to multiple templates to start you off

Instead of building from scratch, Brizy Web Stories provides you with more than 50 template designs to create stories that feel like yours, because they are. The templates are mobile-friendly, short, and snappy enabling quick consumption. Moreover, these templates are fully customizable to make your stories unique, consistent with your brand, and engage your audience like never before.

Brizy Stories is specially designed for you

Anyone can benefit from using Brizy Stories. Brizy Stories is flexible and adaptable to suit the needs, preferences, or characteristics of different people or groups including marketers, news outlets, content creators, shop owners, freelancers, etc.

Ready for the new generation

The new generation wants to consume substantial content quickly, especially on their mobile. Brizy Web Stories are optimized for mobile devices to cater to the on-the-go audience. Additionally, Stories enable you to effectively tell your story through high-quality images, videos, and graphics. These engaging visuals let you capture the attention of the contemporary audience swiftly by delivering a compelling visual narrative in a short time.

Make the most of your stories

Brizy Web Stories allows you to make the most of your stories by enabling

Integration on your site: You can showcase all your stories in one place and bring your website to life. This can increase your online visibility and the on-site user experience.
Monetization: sharing promotions, coupons, deals, or exclusive offers can encourage your audience to do business with you. Additionally, you can monetize your story with ad networks, both direct-sold and programmatic ads, to make the most of your creative work.

Linking out to content: You can make the most of your story by linking to videos, articles, products, and even monetizable affiliate links.
Feedback integration: this will enable you to understand your audience better.

Brizy Web Stories are primarily built on a mobile-first design. This is because more and more online users now access the internet with their smartphones – nearly 93% of internet users to be precise. Over 55% of web traffic comes from smartphones.

With all that in mind, it’s now time to start building compelling web stories you can engage your audience with using Brizy Web Stories.

Step-by-step guide on how to create a web story Brizy Web Stories

In this section, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to create a web story using Brizy Stories.

If you want to tell a great story with Brizy Web Stories, you’ll need to log in to your Brizy Cloud account. If you don’t already have one, you can sign up for a Brizy Cloud account here and then log into it.

NOTE: Brizy Cloud Free plan offers the web stories solution. Going for the PRO plan will give you access to all Stories templates for a headstart.

Signing in for your Brizy account will land you on your dashboard. That’s where we’ll create all new web stories projects and get them in front of your audience. Let’s start with step 1.

Step 1: Create a new Web Story project

This step is straightforward and enables you to create a standalone story. A standalone web Story gives you the URL for just that Story and its content. This direct link is easily shareable and you can link it to other content, and share it on your social media platforms, emails, or website.

It also allows you to promote or highlight specific stories independently, providing a targeted and efficient way to share content with your audience.

To create a new Story project, take the following steps:

1. On your Brizy Cloud Admin dashboard, go to the Stories tab at the top. It will take you to a page like this.

2. Then, click on the Create New Project + button. A prompt window will pop up allowing you to create a new story.

3. Click the Create button under Story project type to add a new Story project.

4. Give your project a memorable name and proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Select a Story design template to start with

This step is optional. You can start building your story from scratch. Or, you can pick a template design that fits the theme of the story you want to share. For this guide, we’ll go for option 2 and select a theme.

NOTE: Brizy Cloud offers both free and PRO Story templates where you can start your Story Project.

To start, hover over your New Story project and click the Edit Story button. This will take you to the Story Builder. It will look like this:

2. To select a template, scroll down and click a new slide to select your preferred template from the window that pops up.

3. Here, you can choose to create your own Story from scratch. Or, pick a template that fits the theme of your story and your business niche. We’ll go for the freelancer stories.

4. Click the Import this story button and wait for it to load something like this on your builder.

That’s pretty much it. You now have a theme you can start working on to create a standalone story.

Step 3: Edit your Story

Your Story needs to be unique and represent your business’s style and brand. The templates can be fully customized in the Styling and Add Elements sections. It enables you to:

Upload visual elements including high-quality images, videos, and animations to add a personalized touch to your Story. This allows you to align the content with your brand aesthetics and convey your message effectively.
Adjust layouts and add design elements like icons, buttons, text, ratings, etc.

3. Include interactive features(for the PRO plan): such as polls, quizzes, or swipe-up links. This not only captures the audience's attention but also encourages participation and interaction with your content.

4. Refine text and captions to accompany your visuals: You can adjust fonts, sizes, and styles, allowing you to maintain a consistent and branded look throughout your Story.

After you’re satisfied with what you see, you can click Update to save all the changes you’ve made. Then, Preview to assess how your Story will appear to viewers.

If there are any necessary adjustments required, you can go back and make changes to ensure a seamless and compelling flow from one slide to the next.

By leveraging the customization capabilities of Brizy Web Stories builder, you can transform templates into unique and engaging narratives that effectively convey your brand's message to your audience.

Standalone-story

The first three steps only allow you to create a standalone Story with a shareable link. If you want to create a Story and link it to your website, then Step 4 is for you.

Step 4: Create and link a Story to your website

To create a Story that’s linked to your website, take the following steps:

NOTE: This feature is only available for the PRO plan.

1. Go back to your Brizy Cloud admin dashboard.

2. Next, locate the website project you want to create your Story. Then, hover over it and click Edit Project. This will take you to the Brizy Website Builder.

3. Click the hamburger menu at the top-left corner and in the Assets section, click the Stories option menu.

4. To add a Story, click the Add New Story button and enter the Story name and its description. This will generate permalink or slug for the Story page in your website.

5. If you’re happy with all the changes you’ve made, click the Save Changes button, go back to the Stories pages, and that’s it.

6. Click the Edit icon and follow steps 2 and 3 to edit your Story just as we’ve walked you through.

Clicking the link will take you to the preview page and enable you to make some little adjustments.

Conclusion

Creating compelling visual web Stories enables you to take your marketing efforts to another level. Web Stories easily grab user attention and engage your audience with substantial and digestible content in a short time.

With Brizy Web Stories, you can get your Stories in front of people in no time. This tool enables you to optimize your Stories with SEO so that people can quickly discover your Stories through your website and social media platforms.