In Defense of Big Budget Video Marketing

You pay a website designer to build your website and an SEO specialist to optimize it. Your branding was designed by a guy who made 4-figures on time spent picking out your color scheme. 

Are you sure you want to turn video marketing over to the amateurs?

Video agencies are kind of like your 35-year old cousin who never gets promoted to sitting at the adults’ table. After assigning seats for everyone else on the marketing team, it fills up and you tell yourself that someone else can handle video.

It’s not a bad idea for a small business, because any video is better than no video. But if you’re working with a marketing budget of any substance, you’re thinking about this backwards.

It’s been said that content is king and that video might just be the most engaging form of it that we have available today. But no worries, they say, you can grab an iPhone and make it yourself.

True! But good luck getting anyone to watch it. The average video we run across racks up 30 – 100 views, never to be seen again. Or it ends up with a prominent placement on your website, scoring views but not results.

Why spend money on production value? If the content can be just as good with low production value, won’t you drive the same results?

If you’re asking these questions, your biggest problem is that you’ve now addressed a video production company and not a video agency.

A production company is kind of like a website designer that asks you to thoroughly outline the website yourself so that he can put your own plan into action.

A video agency is as much an agency as those guys with 300 employees riding scooters through offices in the North Loop (just smaller). A video agency brings creativity, strategy, and thoughtful messaging to the table. A video agency outlines a plan for you after carefully considering every detail. A video agency is working to fulfill your goals.

And to be honest, it takes someone dedicated to the craft to succeed in that.

Why?

Because making an engaging video is hard enough, but having it actually work to fulfill your goals is harder. You might scoff at spending $15,000 to do what an iPhone can do, but if you do, you aren’t yet realizing that your money is being spent mostly on hiring creative people to bring answers for big problems.  That’s a worthy investment.

(PS: If your video vendor justifies their cost by rambling about the gear they own and their shooting ability, then you were right. Do the iPhone video and it will work just as well.)