How much does it cost to create 100+ high-quality business videos in a year? [+Video]

Is your new year’s resolution to create more video content for your business?

Okay, how about to increase revenue? Generate more leads? Connect with more prospects and engender more trust for your sales team? Well then, creating more video should be your new year’s resolution.

If you look at the companies we feature on our success stories page, along with the great results they’ve all experienced leveraging They Ask, You Answer, companies like AQUILA Commercial, Yale Appliance, Advanced Imaging Solutions, and Mazzella Companies all have another thing in common: their commitment to video.

Each one of them committed to video being a key piece of their quest to be the most trusted resource in their industries. They all have YouTube channels full of helpful, educational content that get thousands of views each month. 

So, what would it take for your company to make a similar commitment to video? What would it take for your company to publish an audacious number of videos in 2020?

Let’s say 100 videos.

Sound crazy and unrealistic? Why? Cost? What if I told you it won’t cost as much as you think.

There are two ways to accomplish this audacious goal: outsource and insource. One is financially unrealistic for 99% of companies out there. The other is more realistic than you think.

Let’s break them both down:

The outsourced option

Chances are your company has invested in creating video content in some way before. Chances are also good your company has gone down the commonly tread route of hiring a video production agency to create that video content.

As such, you most likely associate the words “create video content” with “spend lots of money.”

At most companies’ marketing departments, video projects are undertaken 1-2 times per year and each time, at least $5k is spent (and sometimes upwards of $10-$15k). And in each of those engagements, just a few videos actually get created. 

Oftentimes, marketing budgets are set before a year begins and a certain amount of money is set aside for video projects. Then the marketing team has to decide how it's going to use those limited video funds for the year. 

Maybe the CEO has a wishlist of videos he/she would like created, the sales team has their wish list, and it’s up to the marketing team to prioritize and try to make as many people happy as possible.

Then the cycle gets repeated next year and inevitably, people’s requests get left out of the plans year after year.

At best, companies will create 10-15 videos in a year with this approach and will end up spending between $20-30k to do so.

Now hopefully, those videos will be high quality and well-produced, but creating video content in this way keeps video in the realm of a special occasion that happens maybe two or three times a year.

The cost is going to be in the range of $1k-$5k per video. 

I’m not saying this is a terrible way to take on video projects — for a long time this was enough to get by in the world of digital sales and marketing.

In the year 2020, when video is an ever-increasingly critical piece of any company’s digital strategy, however, that plan just isn’t cost-effective in the long run.

As such, it will severely hamper your ability to hit your audacious goal of creating lots of video content over the course of the year, and it will do little to make you the most trusted resource in your industry.

The in-sourced option

Full-time videographer salaries in most major cities generally range from $30k-$50k.

Film programs across the country are churning out graduates every year and very few of them are packing their bags for Hollywood upon graduation (and many of the ones who did make that trip out west come back and are looking for work).

Chances are good there’s someone with video production and editing skills in your town looking for steady work right now.

Of course, not anyone who knows how to operate a camera will be able to step into an in-house videographer job and contribute right away.

We help our clients evaluate candidates’ video production skills when they interview candidates as well as other soft skills they need to have to be successful in the role.

Perhaps there’s someone with a part-time wedding videographer business in your town. They know how to work a camera, know how to edit and even know how to deal with on-camera talent.

If you find that person who’s run their own production company (and is looking to make that their side hustle instead of their full-time job), they’ll even have the business acumen to understand how video plays into a business strategy.

Instead of investing $30k in hiring a video production agency 2-3 times throughout the year to produce a handful of videos for you, why not put that money towards adding a full-time video position to your staff? 

Of course, there’s video equipment to consider in this cost equation as well. While you certainly can spend an infinite amount of money on video equipment, you can get up and running with a camera, tripod, backdrop and professional audio equipment all for under $5,000.

For that same $35k capital investment, instead of paying an outsourced production company, how many videos do you think you’d be able to produce in 12 months?

At IMPACT, we price our video packages to be extremely competitive in the marketplace.

To have our team come to your office for a two-day shoot and product 13 videos for you, it would cost approximately $36k. That’s more than $2700 per video. To produce 100 videos would cost you $276,923.

What if you ended up spending $40k and hired an entry-level videographer? To create 100 videos with an in-house staff member would cost you $400 per video. 

Not only is insourcing your video production significantly less expensive, it also prevents video production from becoming that special occasion twice a year event.

If you want your team to be comfortable on camera, putting their expertise on display and building trust, this is the only realistic way to make it happen. 

We’ve written about the value of insourcing your video content before, but at the end of the day, Marcus Sheridan put it best: “Cultures are rarely developed when the key people are outsourced.”

If you’re interested in building a culture around They Ask, You Answer — a company culture where your employees are passionate about educating the marketplace and building trust — creating helpful video content on a consistent basis is vital.

You don’t want your team to always be struggling to get comfortable on camera, feeling nervous, unsure of whether they’re “doing it right.”

Video is like any other learned skill — practice makes perfect. Imagine if you only did some other aspect of your job once or twice a year. How good would you ever get at it?

The choice is yours

In the year 2020 and beyond, the companies that commit to video as a fundamental piece of their digital marketing strategy are going to experience the most growth.

According to a report published by Wyzowl, 66% of consumers prefer watching a video to reading about a product. Video has been taking on an increasingly dominant place in the digital marketplace, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.

While 100 videos over the course of a year may seem like an audacious or even absurd goal, it’s really not. Especially if you can track the ROI of those videos to the growth of your revenue year over year (like the companies we feature on our success stories page).

Fortune favors the bold, so look around your industry and see who’s leveraging video as a tool for growth and who isn’t. Do you want to be the company in your industry leading the way?