Question: How can I use stop-motion to promote my business?

Answer: Stop-Motion can be used to highlight products, services, and your business as a whole, through scroll-stopping visual content that keeps users interested.

Keeping Promo Content Fresh is Essential

Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter – and none of that is helped by things like constant doomscrolling, or the injection of Artificial Intelligence into our lives. I mean, advertizing has never been “simple” for small business owners, but now? Depending on your perspective on making video content in particular, it’ll either feel easier than ever, or like you’re trying to wade through the quicksand of a CONSTANTLY changing algorithm. Or, more like five of those constantly changing algorithms, let’s be real, no business is on just one social platform. (And if you are… it’s time to expand!!)

But anyway, those attention spans? They mean you’ve got to REALLY keep your content fresh to turn heads.

Stop motion video is a fresh take on social content

We’re constantly reinventing how we create intrigue in the content we’re posting on social media, and that includes new spins on old classics. And that’s exactly what stop motion can do for your social presence (or any promo content, at that!). It’s been around for ages – you’ve definitely seen the classic holiday films that use it, early animations, or projects like Wallace & Grommet. These are obviously large-scale projects, and honestly, the sheer idea of standing around and moving your products (or props related to your product) millimeters between each frame, might sound like a pretty horrible afternoon.

But that’s why you can work with a professional who’ll take that side of it off your plate! You get the magical (moving) imagery to use in your online presence, and we deal with the actual creation of those tools. So the question is – how can EVERY business use stop motion to turn heads on their social presence? Well… in short, LOTS of ways!

Product Business Stop-Motion: You’ve got it easy

I’m not going to pretend that promoting ANY business is easy in 2026, but… when it comes to stop-motion video, product based businesses have an easier task ahead of them. It makes sense though, right? If you’re selling a product, that’s a physical thing. It’s not abstract, and that means you have actual products to place in a frame, and make cool stop-motion scenes with!

Ingredients + Components

And it doesn’t stop there, either. Just because you HAVE products to use, doesn’t mean they have to be the only thing included in your stop-motion sets. Think about the ingredients you use, the components – even about the experience your customers will have with your products! For example, if your end product is a fabulous flavored drink, packed with fruits or berries… then think about how you can bring those into the frame!

Products In-Use

You can also take another approach, and think about your products in use. You might remember this concept from talking about what branding images product-based businesses need overall! In-Use photography highlights your products in-action, and help future customers imagine your cool stuff actually in their life. So if you have a line of hand-made soaps and skin care products, that might look like a stop motion of someone using one of those products, possibly even combined with the previous strategy, using ingredients in the frame too!

Product-based business owners have tons of options for creating engaging stop-motion content for ads and promotion, just because of the nature of your business! Which is a huge win!

Service Business Stop-Motion: Consider metaphors and outcomes

Service-based businesses draw the short straw with stop-motion, because highlighting what you do through imagery in general is a bigger project. Not because you don’t do amazing things, because you do!! But it’s just a lot more difficult to highlight something abstract, like… tax filing… through stop-motion.

Luckily though, we can take some of the same approaches that we do with brand photography overall, and create scenes that highlight a service that way! So if you remember, when we talk about brand photos for service-based businesses, we get creative. There are lots of options, but it’s a much more individual approach than we take to product sellers.

Hybrid-Service Providers

The first thing to think about, is whether you’re technically a “hybrid” service provider. What does this mean? Well, we can actually use me as an example!! As a photographer, I’m a hybrid service provider, because I’m the photographer who provides the service of taking your photos… but you GET something at the end, that’s also a product! Even if you don’t order prints of your photos, you get a DIGITAL product at the end.

So if I was creating stop-motion videos for my own business, there are a million options! I could choose to use a combination of my own process during a session, AND the prints that came out at the end… and you can do this too, if you sell a service that ends with a product!

Abstract Service Providers

This gets a bit more complicated when you provide a more abstract service, like tax filing, or real-estate management, or yoga classes. There aren’t really strict PRODUCTS involved in what you do, or at least not in the traditional way we think about a product. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t use stop-motion to promote your business, it just means you have to take a more unique approach to creating the sets!

For example, if you’re a tax accountant, think about who you serve (individuals vs businesses, for example) and then you can start figuring out how to represent the problem you solve, using props and visuals that can be semi-static. So think “a million post it reminders about how to file your taxes” being removed from the screen one at a time, to uncover your logo, and then replaced with a post it that just reads: “Reminder: Call YOUR BUSINESS NAME HERE”. That communicates how much stress you simplify for your clients, visually, and anyone who files their own will totally relate to the overwhelm of all the little reminder notes.

And these kinds of metaphors and representations can be devised for ANY business! You just have to get creative. The best part of working with Jessica Strobel Photography for your stop-motion, is WE handle the creative side. You just have to know that you want stop-motion for your business promotion – you don’t have to know the exact imagery you want used!

And now it’s all about putting it on your presence!

Once you’ve got the stop-motion videos for your business, it’s all about where you put them! But that’s a whole post in itself, because you’ve got options for that too. Everything from ads on Pinterest to google ad placements can use stop motion! So if it’s something you’re looking into adding to your online promotion strategy this year, it’s time to talk. Just reach out, and we can talk about the options that would work best for you and your business! I’d love to design a package of stop-motion video that helps you bring in more clients. Because at the end of the day, that’s what brand photography/videography in any form should do!

Bonus: Take a look at just a few results that my AMAZING team of collaborators and me have gotten for our social media management clients!