How much is a video?
Cost is probably THE first item on your mind when you think about having a video done for your website.
Don’t worry, you are not alone. It usually is THE first question people keep asking me.
Well, my answer is as you might expect, IT DEPENDS.
Here is what it depends on:
- Do you have a budget?
- What type of video do you want?
- What do you want to achieve with video?
Yup, I start with the money question right out of the starting blocks. Let me show you why this is so important.
At a consultation a couple of years ago, a client answered only the first 2 questions.
The type of video they wanted was a 5-minute, really complex hand-drawn doodle video like the those created for The RSA.
This type of video has a budget in the region of at least $15K to $20K. Yes, fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.
My prospect’s budget was £200.
Now, even if their budget had miraculously grown by 1,000 percent and the production cost of the type of video they wanted could have been magicked down by half, their wishes could still not have been satisfied.
That is why I have my third question:
What do you want to achieve with your video?
Followed by:
How much is a video worth to you?
Here, more often than people simply give up. They have no idea.
But that’s OK because this takes us straight to the core of our topic:
• What do you want your video to achieve?
• How much is achieving this goal worth to you?
• How much are you willing to invest to achieve this goal?
You see, there is a persistent myth that ‘video is expensive’. But this only true if we look at video as an EXPENSE and not as a INVESTMENT.
Let me put this in money terms with two real-life examples (and, yes, I am keeping them fully anonymised):
Let’s say you hit it lucky and you get a video done really cheaply, say for £100.
Your video is on YouTube, and it gets views.
After a while, you check your stats.
Your video had some views right out of the gate but you discovered that most viewers clicked away half way through the video. What is important to note is that this video is 2 minutes long, the only contact information is at the end and lasts only a few seconds.
Then the number of viewers begins to dwindle rapidly.
Result: You did not get any business from your video.
Is this video cheap?
After all, it only cost £100.
In my view, this video was expensive.
Why?
Because it didn’t do anything for your business, it is as if you had flushed the £100 straight down the toilet.
Here is another example:
You get 20 videos done for your website.
Then you discover that these videos tripled your conversion rate.
Would a price tag of £50,000 for these videos be expensive or a good investment?
Let’s do the sums:
Six months later, you discover that because of the increase in conversion rate, the value of these videos to your business was £750,000 a year.
You paid £50,000 and added £750,000, which is a Return On Investment of 15 to 1.
This is insanely profitable, which, in my book, makes the £50,000 look really cheap.
That’s funny, isn’t it: £100 is expensive and £50,000 is cheap.
As I said, these are real-life examples. A major liberty I have taken was that, in the second case, they actually paid way less than £50,000 for their videos. Now run the figures.
Now you know what ‘it depends’ on when you want to calculate the cost of a video.
Don’t worry, I won’t let you go without any some specific price information.
Here are some average video prices drawn from the largest video market in the world:
On average, the cost of a 1-to-2-minute-long video is approximately $1,000 per minute.
However, this is only an average figure. Here is what this average depends on:
In the first instance, videos can be FREE – if you create your own videos.
The danger here is that your videos can look amateurish and that the lack of professional finish can damage your brand, image and credibility.
Semi-Professional videos that are 1-to-2-minutes long vary from $1,500 to $3,000.
At this level, there can still be problems with variable quality, and the content is not always guaranteed to hit the marketing sweet spot.
Animated 1-to-2-minute-long videos start at about $3,000. My reservations here are the same as those for the next price category.
Professionally developed, created and produced videos that are 1-to-2-minutes long cost from $5,000 to $20,000 and, of course, way beyond.
There should be no problems with production quality while the content is likely to be a corporate video.
These videos absolutely have their place, just like animated videos have their place, but the important question I would ask myself is in both cases: Is this the type of video I really want? Will this type of video be optimal for my business? This particularly important for professional services businesses.
These are, of course, generalised average prices. One important aspect they ignore is the benefits generated by economies of scale that arise when a whole series of videos is created all at once. If you want to know more about the benefits of these economies of scale, just get in touch.
So, there you have the cost of video. There is only one question that still needs to be answered:
What do you want to achieve with video?
Do you have any further questions? Would you like me to cover specific topics in future videos? Do you wish to be notified when the next video in this series will be published? I’ll be delighted to answer all these questions and will reply as quickly as possible. Just use the form below to get in touch.
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