Video Marketing Budget Breakdown

An inside look at a company's spend for online video.

In this article we will be looking at a snapshot of a mid sized company that has invested in online video as a core strategy. We outline how much money is spent and on what components of video, from software to production in this video marketing budget breakdown.

It’s important for companies to benchmark and plan a decent budget for online video, comparable to organizations similar in size. The following data is based on research conducted by 50Wheel and experience by represented parties. The video marketing budget breakdown is from a company with 135 employees and $25-50MM in revenue.

6 month video spend

video-expendatures-2

The total spend for the year was around $80,000 to $90,000, which included everything from video hosting software to video ads on popular social networks. Let’s break down each section to see exactly what they did and why.

Software

Software includes any application used in the video process purchased or licensed. Examples are video hosting, screen capture apps, video editing software, online file storage, etc. This company implemented a premium video hosting provider that specialized in video marketing feature sets. Based on the amount of content hosted and integrations, the monthly license fee came out to $500 a month (or $6,000 a year) — which is on the lower end of what this software costs for the use case.

Not included in this budget snapshot is video editing software, this is because the company uses a 3rd party agency to create content on a monthly basis (those expenses show up under “Production” below). Included is file storage and FTP. Besides hosting videos on a video marketing platform, the company chooses to store master backups in the cloud using a common solution available. Total software spend is $550 a month.

Production

Video production typically varies across the board based on strategy and budget. In this case, the company has embraced a content strategy that includes customer stories, support content, event videos, and recorded webinars. Where customer and event videos are expensive to produce because they require more equipment and travel, webinars are effective and inexpensive.


Customer Videos

The company produced a customer video almost every other month for the year at a cost of $5,000 each. Customer videos were also tied to distribution campaigns paired with paid components outlined in the “Distribution & Promotion” section below.

Support Tutorials

Support tutorials varied across the board depending on the month. In similar sized companies, support and tutorial content is typically user generated via screen capture and mobile devices. Simple unpolished production is acceptable, but in this company’s case they have budgeted to have the user generated content cleaned up and branded by their 3rd party video production agency. Monthly costs for these services range from $250 to $900 for each month.

Event Videos

Unless a company has endless budget for events, the team most likely has a select few, strategic shows it attends each year. This was the case with this company, and since events are so far and few in between they are a great venue to capture video. The company also realized that a lot of their customers and partners were stopping by their booth and attending live sessions, so budget was put in place to get as much video as possible at events. Event video spend ranged from $10,000 to $25,000 and included customer videos, speakers/sessions, on the floor interviews.


Distribution & Promotion

There are a number of distribution options and in most cases this may be where your company spends the most money related to the video you create. This company does not list paid search and non-video costs in their video budget. What is included is spend related to promoted videos on both YouTube and Facebook. The marketing team runs paid pre-roll YouTube ads with customer videos and select content, while hosting similar content on Facebook and promoting the post its tied to. YouTube spend was $2,200 a month and Facebook ranged from $1,600 to $2,000 a month.

By now you should have a sense of how your company’s video budget compares to our example video marketing budget breakdown. It easy to see why spending the time and resources to build out a thought through video strategy can help you maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. With so much budget spent on content creation, having software and a plan to get it out is a must! In a future article we will take a look at the company’s results over the same duration and how they are recorded and reported.

 

50Wheel is the world's leading website for video strategy and marketing technologies. Browse hundreds of software tools, guides and get strategy advice.

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