How Much To Spend On Video Marketing
Is video marketing worth it?
If you’re looking to explore or do more with video marketing as a communications tactic, welcome! You’re likely grappling with one of the biggest questions around; how much of your precious marketing budget to spend on video? Let’s just say up front that video marketing is not a trend, it’s an invaluable asset in communicating what you and your organisation are about. Knowing that, trying to determine what amount of money is appropriate is really dependent on your goals. Short versus long-term growth, nurturing existing clients or trying to capture new customers, advertising versus corporate communications. As content creators and campaign strategists, we’re here to give you some answers about how to plan your spend on video marketing.
Invest For Sales and Cashflow
First up, view of video as a marketing investment. It’s a popular, powerful and effective tool in communication. Use it across a range of tactics such as awareness, product knowledge, lead generation, reviews, testimonials and more. Your marketing budget should be allocating funds for producing any or, ideally, all of these kinds of video. That just gets you the content. You still have to distribute it; pushing it out on paid promotion, organic reach and to your existing database of customers or followers. So you’ll need additional funds from your budget to get your content seen. No marketing effort is successful if no one knows about it.
Video Marketing ROI
Next, how much money you spend on video marketing comes down to goals. A minimum outcome should be 2:1 return on investment, but we typically tell our clients to expect 3-5x ROI. Let’s make an important observation here. When you spend money to produce marketing collateral, that’s an upfront cost that becomes cheaper per unit over time. With each ad campaign you run that content costs less and less as you’re only paying the marginal cost of advertising placement. Each new lead, conversion or customer gets more and more economical. Define what you want your video marketing to achieve. Is it leads, awareness, a reduction in customer service calls, promotion or cultivating goodwill? That will help define not only the message in your videos but the audience and metrics to confirm how it’s performing.
Video Marketing Budget
But what about the actual dollars and cents for your video marketing budget, you ask? Video production budgets are as cheap or as expensive as your ambition. To give a reference, a very simple no-frills project comes in under $3,000 and if you want to get up to the production value seen in broadcast TV advertising, you’re in the $50,000+ bracket. It all comes down to your business, brand, marketing goals and the ROI you’re after. Quite honestly if you spent $25,000 on video production (single or multiple productions) plus another $20,000 on promotion but earned over $200,000 in sales or PR exposure for your business for example, you’ve made a handsome return on your investment. In that sense, the video production and marketing budget is less important than the results that it delivers.
Our Approach
At Vitamin Media we’ve chosen the monthly plan option. It can deliver long-term results while leaving you in control of your budget. It’s both a content creation strategy giving you plenty of assets to post AND a distribution plan that puts you in front of your audience at the right time in their buying journey. You can scale up or down at any time, or discuss one-off projects. Explore those here.
Advertising Spend
Remember that you have incredible control over how much and how quickly you spend your advertising budget. Big brands do a lot of testing and refining as they roll out their campaigns. You’ll no doubt keep an eagle-eyed stare on the response rate from your efforts. If you’re using popular social media channels, start with a modest $5-$10/day spend, and allow some time to pass to collect data. Advertising works best with repeat exposure, building familiarity in your target market, so give your campaign at least a couple to three weeks to generate more reliable data. Analyse it and adjust, don’t pull the plug. You’re in business for the long haul, so treat your marketing like a marathon not a sprint.
Be Strategic With Video Marketing
Don’t expect that publishing a couple videos on popular social media channels is going to start producing immediate and viral results. What you’re aiming to do is build a connection with your viewer to foster trust, awareness and like-ability. You need a variety of videos in your library because the lead generation video for your sales funnel is not going to nurture existing customers or address product knowledge or frequently asked questions. These are all for different audiences or for different stages of the customer journey.
Working with a production partner makes economic sense, simply because you don’t have to acquire all the equipment, learn how to produce, edit, and distribute. You’re the expert in your industry which is your unique selling point. They bring not just the knowledge of how to create content, but the broader experience of working on different campaigns and what is successful. That’s a perspective you can’t get from within the bubble of your business.
If your production partner is looking after your best interests, they’ll be steering you towards proven content that really connects with your audience. It should be as evergreen as possible so you can squeeze as much value out of it as you can. Testimonials and reviews take a long time to date. Product knowledge has a good shelf-life and sharing your ‘Why’ can build long-term loyalty with new and existing customers. This will deliver long-term value for your investment
Take a long-term view of your spend on video marketing. Just like print collateral, giveaways, trade shows and traditional advertising, video content is an investment in telling your story and building affinity with your client base. How much you spend on video marketing isn’t about a specific number it’s about your ambition and objectives.