How to Determine Your Next Video Budget

The first question we always get asked in our consultation calls is about pricing. Rightfully so, most people have no idea how much video productions truly cost. They don’t know how much a studio rental would be, how much 10 background extras would be, how much that fancy cinema camera would cost to rent. The list goes on and on. Luckily, it’s our job to help you with all that. The only number you need to know in the beginning of a production process is your own internal budget. This number has nothing to do how much video services cost, but everything to do with how much you can afford and what goals you’re trying to achieve.

To figure out this number, a good benchmark is to determine your company’s total gross revenue by speaking to your accounting department. Let’s say you are a medium sized start up and your total gross revenue was $500,000 last year. Your total marketing budget for the year should be roughly 10-20% of that number. Let’s take the median 15% for this example, which would be $75,000.

Once you have your total marketing budget, you need to put together a content strategy for how many pieces of content you’d like to produce, and how much you’d like to allocate to promote the content in ad campaigns. We recommend if you have a lot to spend, divide the budget into four and make a plan for content you will produce each quarter of the year. In this case, you’d have $18,750 to spend each quarter. With this approach, you can hire a company like Neuway Media on a retainer-based payment plan which will lock us into contract with you every month of the year, meaning you are guaranteed a certain amount of time from us each month.

You can choose to spend that $18,750 each quarter on any kind of marketing material, from videos to photography, graphic design, or even just text-based ads. Videos are proven to give you the most return on investment of any form of advertising, so we recommend allocating the most into video.

Once you have that number, you can approach your video production company with a budget and your marketing goals and we can take the reins from there, showing you what you can do with that budget and helping you estimate how much impact you can expect to drive.

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