How Much Marketing Budget Should You Allocate for a Robust Video Campaign? 

From a free video call with grandma, to a campaign put on by a major brand, video production costs range from zero to millions. And although nowadays you can produce video content for almost nothing, you might be wondering if it’s a better idea to hire professionals! 

So how do you establish a proper budget? The answer is intent. 

At the core of visual storytelling is the why. Once you define your purpose and the reason for your video campaign, the what and the how will help you build a strong and effective budget.

About Intent 

According to Google, the goal of a video campaign is to help you expand your reach and gain potential customers. This is achieved by creating video campaigns that drive specific actions in your website, connecting viewers with your brand, and eliciting actions from those viewers. 

These goals are generic and somewhat impersonal. In the context of audience engagement through video storytelling, intent (as opposed to “goals”) is far more specific and can help you discover what you really want to do. 

Let’s say you want your videos to do a ton of things. Expand your reach, introduce a new product to a new audience, drive traffic to your site, and perhaps generate leads and sell stuff. That’s a tall order! 

A video campaign can address all of these needs separately, but for intent illustration purposes, we will address just one of these. 

Let’s say your goal is to first expand your reach. You are effectively saying “hello” to people who don’t know you yet, hoping they like you well enough and introduce you to their friends. So let’s just pretend you are at a party and you don’t know anybody. 

What do you do? 

I bet you will first read the room a little, approach a few people who are engaged in conversation (in the most non-creepy way you can), and just listen for a bit. Then move on, do the same somewhere else a couple of times, perhaps get a drink and adopt a similar body language to make yourself look approachable and safe to others. 

Then and only then, will you say “hello!”, listen some more, and only say something that will add to the conversation, or entertain in a way that will be accepted and embraced. 

What if it works!? Let’s say your witty remark brings a smile and an interaction. Can you sustain it? Are you being yourself enough, so that it will be effortless to carry on? 

The lesson: Be authentic. Be charming. Be entertaining. Be consistent. 

Defining a clear intent will not only inform you as to the why you are at the party to begin with but most importantly what you want your audience to feel as they interact with you.  

About Budget 

Perhaps you are now thinking about your video campaign differently. Maybe you are now considering the reason behind your need, and your true intent beyond specific marketing goals. 

Hopefully you are also thinking about the human approach to meaningful video interactions and ways to strengthen communication and build audiences who would want to hear from you time and time again. 

Ok, so down to the nitty gritty. Think of how much you are spending now on your entire marketing effort. That includes print, tv, radio, online, social media, events, etc.  

Which marketing efforts are driving most of your leads, sales, or income? Is there a new channel you would like to explore? Maybe events? 

If most of your leads are coming in via print ads, video might not necessarily need to be an ad as well. Perhaps it could be a story that would matter to the audience that reads the kinds of magazines where your print ads exist. If your print ads are inside “Hockey Life” magazine, a video showcasing a volunteer event with your staff at a charity hockey tournament could just be the thing.  

You can start thinking about a video campaign that would feature your staff doing these events across the country! One every month for a year. What a great video series that would be! 

Now, what is your budget for this idea? $100? $1,000? 10,000? $100,000? 

Let’s say that your marketing budget for the whole nationwide event is tapped between venues, transportation, hotels, and incidentals. But you would like to have some sort of video production record of the tour, and you only have $2000 left. 

What you need is a plan. You would hire pros like us to consult and come up with a strategy that would define a clear intent and help you with a content production strategy. 

Considering your budget, we would suggest something like this:

• Recruit one person from your staff to shoot videos with their mobile while on tour.
• Tell them to do interviews that are short and fun, focused on one family or player.
• Post the videos as they are shot.  
• Share via social media channels. 

We would perhaps have a video call with the person who would be shooting the videos, and give them a quick primer on what to look for, how to notice it, maybe how to shoot it, and the frequency of posts. 

Congratulations! You are now well on your way to a great video series. You might even have some cash left over to buy pizza for the whole crew. 

The creativity came from a few good ideas and had very little to do with the budget. The effectiveness of your series had as its source your approach to storytelling and the decision to share relevant content to an audience that would love the type of stories you were telling! 

The lesson: Tell stories that matter to your audience. Tell them with authenticity, relevance, and consistency of message. 

Conclusion 

In essence, a robust video campaign depends largely on the concept and its effectiveness for the audience who is viewing it. The budget is secondary. But if you want hard costs, a consulting session with us will run you just a few hundred bucks.  

Share with us what you would like to do, and we can help you define your intent. I bet that once you define the why, we will together find a way to make it happen for the cost you can allocate. 

A clear intent will allow your creativity to flow. We can help you polish your idea and come up with a strategy that could make great use of your allocated budget.