2023

How to use Motion Storyline

Motion Storyline works best when paired with some other similar products. This will be a guide to using Webflow, Netlify, and Ubersuggest to create a marketing content focused website.

  1. Motion storyline will not dynamically generate the type of home page you want / need for your project. We recommend customizing a Webflow template and exporting it as HTML.
  2. Once your pages are finished you have the option of downloading the HTML for each one individually. Place each download into a folder and place the HTML generated from Webflow into the same folder.
  3. Upload to Netlify! (It will accept an entire folder to drag and drop).

  4. Two common use cases for generating HTML using Motion Storyline are blog and landing pages. You can always make updates to any entry or add new entries, and export the whole project and re-upload to Netlify. The updating process should remain very fast even if project are very large and require much less time than the content update.

  5. The fun part of the project is that now you can integrate Ubersuggest into your writing. Start researching keywords and write your content in accordance with your research, and update. If you are used to using Wordpress with Yoast plugin, you will find a similar workflow and approach.


See / say

A concept to keep in mind is see / say - in other words, you can show a picture of a concept and write the concept idea in text over the picture, but nothing was really added to the display ad. Re-writing the text in a way that the imagery plays off each other creates synergy that isn't just using redundancy. Using Motion Storyline to generate content as a placeholder or tracks for direction is a time saver, but can lead to saying the same thing in different formats - for example, animations text would say the same thing as your static HTML. Summarizing with bullet points may be useful - instead of all the text content only the headlines are shown. On the other hand in some cases it is best to be redundant - for example a common blog format is to:
  1. Say what you are going to talk about (summarized points)
  2. Saying it
  3. Recapping what you said
Which is a common pattern seen in many variations across web content. Content generation for this example is great because ideally you would simple write in the content (#2. Saying it) and the summary and recap would be generated. However, other times the generated content will need to be re-worked.

A common example borrowed from PowerPoint assisted presentations is to create organizational topic lists, and then to freestyle the actual presentation. This provides a track for what the information is but not a script. Using Motion Storyline to generate content quickly can serve in this way - instead of the finalized content being generated across different formats you can think of it as a starting point with summarized topics as a starting place. To avoid unwanted see / say, you can then go in to refine and customize the content in each format to be exactly what you want without having to start from a blank slate.