A unique “About Us,” whether for your website, new business proposals, or other promotional materials for your firm, is an important part of telling your story.
Unfortunately, many of the best About Us examples out there seem to be high budget and tech or design intensive.
So how can you create a compelling About Us on limited budget or resource?
Here are eight About Us examples to inspire you.
Say it with Video
Video is an excellent way to do your About Us for a variety of reasons:
- It allows your customers and prospects to see you in as close to real life as possible. That creates an instant connection because as they peruse the rest of your site, they do it in context of the personality you’ve already shown them in your video.
- You can use it anywhere: On site, in proposals, at events. Don’t want to talk to some one at a networking event, just whip out your video (OK, don’t do that, but you get my point).
- You can easily edit or change it to keep it as updated, timely, and accurate as possible.
Even better, they are a lot of fun, easy, and low-cost ways to use video.
Get a Professional
While your eyeballs might be popping out of your head at the fear of huge dollar signs to hire a professional videographer to do an About Us video for you and your team, that doesn’t need to be the case.
For example, our friend Tony Gnau offers a couple of different programs for organizations looking for great About Us videos and an affordable price.
(He also has a great blog post about how to create About Us Videos. A must read if you are thinking about going down the video road.)
Have Your Clients Say it
Who says YOU have to be the one who stars in your About Us video?
Prospects probably care more about what the people who already pay you to run their communications programs think.
So let them say it.
Interview clients about what you do and what they love about you, then pull it together in a montage which speaks to who you are as a firm.
The following questions seem to create the most compelling, “made for T.V.” responses:
- How have we changed your business?
- What makes us different than other PR firms?
- What do you value the most about working with us?
- If you had to describe us to a friend, what would you say we do?
Make Your Team Stars
You probably have no better advocates than your team members.
Make them the stars.
Questions to ask:
- What makes you excited to come to work every day?
- Why are you proud to work for us?
- What’s your favorite moment as part of this team?
For both this one and the client video you can use your phone to record if they are local.
Otherwise get them on a Zoom call and record from there (you might want to do this if they are local as well, we’ve found excellent quality from Zoom video recordings. For examples, check out one of our Spin Sucks Inquisitions).
There are a lot of low-cost video editing software options out there which will allow you to slice and dice, add subheads and captions, and create a pretty professional looking video on a tiny budget.
I currently use Wondershare Filmora, after trying out many, and have been pretty happy with the value and ease of use.
The 1 Second Everyday App
I decided to do a blog post of About Us examples because of this app.
About a month ago I was listening to the Ted Radio Hour on NPR, and they did a fascinating show about our concept of time.
One of the guest was entrepreneur Cesar Kuriyama, who created the 1 Second Everyday app, which takes one-second video recordings of your day, every day, and compiles them into a video at the end of the year (or whatever time frame you specified).
I knew I had to have it, so I immediately downloaded it.
After playing with it a while, it dawned on me: This would be fantastic for an organizational About Us video.
It’s a quick, clear, real life way to show a day in the life of what you do.
You also don’t have to wait a year to make it.
You can back populate photos and videos you already have on your phone (they will pop up for the dates they were taken on).
If you have your team take a couple of months to take something every day, you’ll have the beginning of a great About Us video.
Even better, this “About Us” video example will very easily and organically evolve and change as your firm grows and changes.
Make it an Infographic
Infographics are About Us examples that can be crafted in endless ways.
Limited only by your creativity.
You could make it number and data based.
Things such as:
- Serving clients for XX years.
- Generated $XX dollars of revenue for clients in 2017 or XX leads. (You’ll have to have the real data for this one, but if you do, it’s amazingly powerful. Looks like another good reason to measure your work, huh?),
- XX combined years of experience.
- A touch of something fun such as XX cups of coffee consumed daily.
Or maybe make it more concept based.
A flow chart of how you work, how you see communications, or what makes you different.
You could do it timeline based.
Focused on how you’ve grown and changed as an organization.
These infographic About Us examples are just a few rain drops in a river of options.
Find one that speaks to your PR firm.
Answer A, B, C, or D, All The Above?
What if you base your about us around engagement and make it an interactive quiz?
I’m pretty proud of this About Us example because I just thought of it.
Now, I’m sure someone, somewhere has done it, and so it’s unoriginal, but I haven’t seen it, so I’m calling it mine.
If you do this can you tell people you use the “PetroQuiz About Us Theory” to create it? And then I’ll be faaaaaamous!
But don’t worry, I’ll remember the little people who helped get me to stardom.
The idea is to create questions that help people learn about the important aspects of your firm.
A few that might work for us would be:
What is the strategic communications framework developed by our firm’s CEO?
- a) The Yen model
- b) The PESO model
- c) The Runway model
- d) The Honeybadger model
What type of metrics does our firm feel are most important to measure the success of your communications strategy?
- a) AVEs
- b) Facebook Likes
- c) Donut Equivalencies
- d) Leads generated, leads converted, sales, revenue, and other real business metrics
(We all know the answer is (c) for that last one. That was a softball.)
Now you can either make this interactive, where the real answer pops up once they guess (there are numerous plugins for that) or just type it out, so the answers and rationale are included under every question.
You could even be untraditional and use your About Us as a kind of lead magnet where they enter their email at the end receive the answers.
If you do this, you need to make sure the questions and answers provide more value than just talking about yourself.
Otherwise, it will flop.
Your Favorite About Us Examples
And sometimes the best way to decide what you want to do for your About Us is to see great examples of how other people have tackled this feat.
So now it’s your turn —
- What About Us examples do you love?
- Why did you choose to format your own About Us the way you did?
