Video Production Budget Tips
All business activities beg for video: Products, offers and services. Today, all online visitors expect video. But messages, offers, and products change constantly, forcing you to update before your precious online video assets go stale.
The uncomfortable truth though is that demand for online video is growing much faster than your budget to produce it. Without a modern strategy, creating video can drain your content budget very quickly. You can tame your video content budget, however.
Until recently, video often required specialised skills, fancy equipment, big budgets, and lots of effort. A super-slick video could cost anywhere from R 70 000 to R 700 000 or more to produce. Armies of gaffers, lighting specialists, camera people, and makeup artists descended on your company premises. And whilst impressive to see Hollywood unfold on your company’s premises, the new truth is that you don’t always need Hollywood production values to make a video that delivers value.
By being smart, you can stretch your budget to fill all those video needs:
1. Divide your videos into three tiers, and execute each one differently.
Lets assume you have R 600 000 in your annual content budget earmarked for video. Would you rather spend your entire budget on producing three Hollywood-style video productions at R 200 000 per production, or can you live with just one video masterpiece and save the remaining R 400 000 to create dozens of perfectly good videos for scores of different campaigns?
Marketers are better served by segmenting their video efforts into three tiers — each with different levels of visibility, production values, and expenditure/effort per segment:
Video Showpieces:
Splashy videos that grace the home page of your website. You use them on trade exhibitions and sales meetings. They grab attention, turn heads, get the heart pounding, and stop visitors in their tracks. Look at these example from Olympus
Also look at the General Motors video-enabled home page.
Pull out all the stops on these videos, for they help define your company, your brand, and the aura that surrounds them.
Video Workhorses:
Videos to highlight your key technologies, explain your most important products, and introduce your most visible people to help move prospective buyers along in the buying process. These videos are important because they show and explain at an advanced level. They are crisp, clear, and typically the videos that get passed around when a group is involved in a buying decision. Look at this simple product video from Salesforce.com — one of more than 2,600 on their website and YouTube channel.
You don’t need to be cute or splashy — just focused, authoritative, clear, and in a style that conveys the personality of your organisation. And the expenditure per minute can be one-fifth what your showpieces will cost.Niche audience videos:
Video is great to provide potential customers with a much deeper understanding of your products (and the thinking behind them), and to answer frequently asked questions. The subject-matter experts in your company — the people who invent your technologies and support your customers in the field — can really add value here. The topics covered in these videos typically apply to more of a niche-based interest. Here’s an example of niche audience video content from Alcatel-Lucent: an video presentation video presentation that’s really a chalk-talk about a key technology
This content can be of utmost importance to a content marketing strategy; the key is to use the power of video while keeping spending very low. Allocating your marketing budget among these three tiers — and making sure you spend appropriately for each video you produce — is a critical first step. But it’s only the start.
2. Broaden your understanding of what a video is.
Over the years, television ingrained in us a concept of what a video is: a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, designed to be viewed in its entirety. It creates a largely passive experience — the choices are to watch it or turn it off. And it’s got a certain “look”, characterised by high production values.
Look at this example of a showpiece video that DigiNovations produced recently for Piper Aircraft.
That’s what your showpiece videos should look like, too. These showpieces can break through some of the TV boundaries by becoming more interactive, engaging, and non-linear.
But what about the rest of your video productions, where you can’t afford to do a “full Spielberg” on every video? Here you have to broaden your definition of and what’s acceptable as video. Think about these options: Short, educational mini-segments: When you discover a good, expert storyteller in your organisation, take advantage of his or her abilities to create a series of mini-segments.
Complementary to the showpiece video shown above, Piper Aircraft produced much simpler “Tech Tour” videos — consisting only of an engineer, a computer, and a mouse — that take viewers inside the design of the aircraft. Here’s an example. Six of these segments were filmed at a single 90-minute seating, keeping the per-segment budget low but the impact high.
Formula-based videos:
Zappos, a clothing retailer has evolved a formula that makes workhorse and long-tail video down to a science. It has published thousands of “video descriptions” of its products, like this example here:
Each video is less than 60 seconds, very simply produced (each video is probably under R 300, since their shop produces around 60 to 80 per day), and is reported to raise conversions by between 6 and 30 percent. That’s a high ROI!
Text-and-still videos:
Not all your videos need to be a documentary. Nestle Waters has a video series that answers FAQ's about bottled water. The segments consist mostly out of a series of text slides, complemented by still images. Each one is search-optimised around keywords that reflect the most common concerns about bottled water. And because these videos are highly modular, they can be created and added one at a time, spreading the effort and expense out over time.
Man on the street:
Your video content doesn’t always need to come from inside your organisation. You can get surprising results just by taking a camera out on the street and ask your customers to help create your content, like we did with Northcliff auto:
Online video presentations:
The easiest way to make videos is by combining PowerPoint presentations and your best communicators, and weaving them together into online video presentations. Most organisations have a library of presentations and really great storytellers for each of their products, technologies, and concepts. The international strategy consulting firm Parthenon Group puts out a regular economic outlook video presentation, presented by its chief economist, Roger Brinner. Simple to produce, but powerful in effect because they contain the detailed analytical charts with the authority and color that Mr. Brinner’s commentary provides.
These are just some of many ways to create video content without breaking the bank. The key is to keep it simple without compromising on basic production values like good sound, good lighting, and a steady camera. (Notice that none of these is shot by an intern with a Flip-Cam — a technique that, more often than not, conveys production values that hurt your brand image more than helping it.)
3. Cultivate a video-creation community in your organisation.
You really can produce a lot of great online video by yourself. By why not share the effort — and the glory — with others in your organisation? Many companies have plenty, valuable, re-useable digital content, and great storytellers. Make use of them!
Realise that potential video content is all around you, every day. Every time an executive keynotes a conference, a product manager gives a briefing to the sales team, or a technologist gives a customer briefing, that’s potential marketing content. Smart content marketers are alert, using the opportunities to videotape these sessions for possible re-use.
Even if the presentation is situation-specific, you can recreate a more generic version for content marketing purposes. Sure, some will resist being recorded. Change your approach with the more timid types and tell them that you only need their subject matter expertise. Over time, they may warm up and share their knowledge in the form of graphs, charts, slides etc. Narrate the online video presentation for them, if they don't want to appear on-camera. Once they see the video, it may persuade them to approach you with their next great idea, ready to make their debut on video.
Using video for content marketing doesn’t have to be hard. And it doesn’t need to be expensive. Dividing your video content needs into tiers and matching the appropriate production process to these tiers, will enable you to stay within budget and unleash the full persuasion and conversion power of video on your prospects.