Squeezing Out Every Drop From Your Video Marketing Budget

We are currently in the next progression of advertising. Video is no longer reserved for just YouTube or TV and it’s proving to be incredibly effective in Facebook ads, websites, and social media. At my company, Visual Captive, we are strong believers in its benefits and have seen first hand how effective videos can be for business growth.

Making the transition to video content can be daunting because the price to hire a production company for a full day can easily be 2–5x more than the cost to hire a photographer

However, one thing that is not often discussed is the cost to produce videos vs. photos. Making the transition to video content can be daunting because the price to hire a production company for a full day can easily be 2–5x more than the cost to hire a photographer for a full day. More equipment is needed including lighting, sound, rigging equipment. Additionally, more assistants are needed to operate the equipment and editing can take much longer.

Your previous marketing budget could maybe buy you a year's worth of photos for your social media, but now with video, you are struggling to get enough content for a quarter. So how do you stretch that same budget to last you a year while taking advantage of the benefits of video? By taking a different approach to how you view video shoots and what the final product of those video shoots are.

Here are the four approaches:

1. Traditional — Video and Photoshoots are viewed as individual campaigns. Content is typically posted consecutively on social media or is used in one ad. Content is not re-used once posted.

2. Re-Edit — Video content is recut telling a similar, but different story. Videos can also be recut by mixing old videos and new videos to create fresh content. Content might be posted today, but re-edits are posted months from now. Stock videos can be used to add new elements to older content. More content yielded from shoots.

3. Condensed Shoots — Instead of shooting 10 videos independently, you can plan to film all 10 across 2–3 shoots. Condense the shoots to gain efficiencies from crews and equipment already being on-site.

4. Hybrid (Condensed Shoots + Re-Edit) — Plan your video shoots with the intention of reusing content. Capture additional shots, change props, swap in different talent to ultimately produce multiple stories and edits. Instead of planning a video shoot around 1 storyboard, plan around multiple variations.

Plan for your videos to be produced in such a way that they can be cut and re-edited into multiple posts. Instead of aiming for one final video edit, you can aim for delivery of 10–20 10 sec long edits that can used as Instagram stories, posts, or in ads. It’s really tempting to stay in the mindset that photos are delivered in sets, but videos are delivered as a single product. This doesn’t have to be true.

Here is another way to look at it. When you hire a video production company you are ultimately paying for their time, the location, equipment, editing, and general production services. Most of these costs are quoted in half-day or full-day rates. You are paying for their time and the more you can get out of that time you have paid for the better. A quote for a project with 6 videos delivered may still cost more than a video with only 1 video delivered, but those 6 will certainly be cheaper than if you filmed them all on 6 separate days. You need to take advantage of the efficiencies of having all that equipment on-site with a film crew ready to go.

If you engaged with a production company and said I have 10 videos I need to do this year and I want a quote for all 10 to be filmed independently throughout the year, they will quote each video as it’s own production. However, if you asked that same production company to film those 10 videos during 2 shoots during the year, the cost will be much lower. Equipment rental fees are minimized, planning meetings are condensed, travel costs are reduced, etc. This is assuming there is enough time in 2 days to film your 10 videos.

Depending on your product or service, the raw video captured in those 10 videos could also be re-edited to create variations that are posted as additional unique posts. Ultimately this strategy could really yield you 15–20 videos for a year from 10 original concepts shot across 2 days.

Instead of planning for each of your videos to be 1 concept, strategize on what else could be filmed on-location? Can you film another actor or product? If you were to re-edit the video, what else would be needed to tell two different stories? What props are easy to swap to create a different scene? If you can think through questions like this, your production company can help capture more on the day of shooting to yield more final deliverables. That is how you can stretch your budget further and squeeze out every drop.

Author Biography: Phil Skulte is the owner of Visual Captive, a Minneapolis-based video production company. He specializes in commercial video work and enjoys sharing his knowledge with aspiring creators and business owners.