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Understand Video Production Costs
In an era when companies are eager to limit their expenditures and cut their budgets, it’s natural to ask what parts of your marketing and communications efforts could stand reductions. Video production, however, has become too vital to brand-building to be an easy candidate for cuts.
So, if you want to limit spending but don’t want to suffer the consequences of reduced video output, what do you do? First, it’s worth understanding some of the typical costs that underlie corporate video production services. With this knowledge, you can formulate a strategy that combines strong performance with a reasonable video production budget.
What Contributes to Corporate Video Production Costs?
Production quality and sophistication have increased significantly over the years. Producing corporate video content that will reach your target audience today often means using elaborate methods. These often come with overhead costs, and breaking down those expenses is the first step toward saving money where possible.
Some potential corporate video production cost centers include:
- Travel: Both sending talent and crew to a new city and moving between locations can incur expenses. This may be exacerbated if your video production takes place during a busy season, or in a region with few transportation options. Even seemingly incongruous costs like parking can add up.
- Lengthy delays or inactivity: Any breakdowns in the production process — weather delays on location, a failure to provide necessary collateral on time, inefficient workflows in video editing or post-production — can decrease the efficiency of your video project, lengthening the time to value.
- Equipment or facility rental: When you don’t have go-to options for equipment or studio facilities, the costs can mount. If your production crew is working in a location without a strong filmmaking infrastructure, this can impact video production rates even further.
- Permit applications: Some locations allow free filming. Others require paid permission. Still, others also have added expenses around aerial and drone filming. It’s important to know the costs and restrictions associated with video production services so these costs don’t surprise you.
It’s important to note when calculating video production pricing that not every excess cost comes down to dollars and cents. The most recent Wyzowl study revealed that while 10% of non-video-users are driven off by the costs, 30% feel unable to invest the necessary time.
Many of the issues that can add costs, both time and money, to your video budget, are addressable through a strong, well-developed corporate video production strategy. When you and an expert video production company deal with permitting, scheduling, travel and overall timelines in advance, it’s easier to keep your costs from snowballing.
Learn when to film on location and how video production companies can do it effectively.
How Do You Lower the Expense of Your Corporate Videos?
When working with a video production company, there are a few specific elements you can work into your overall strategy to keep your costs under control. Not all of these methods will work for every business — after all, no two corporate video strategies are alike — but some combination of them may save you money without sacrificing production quality:
- Investigate AI productivity tools that can streamline processes at all steps of video production, from ideating early concepts to generating captions for your finished videos.
- Embrace remote directing, which allows your employees to capture footage of themselves on their own devices while receiving instructions from an off-site expert.
- Use more animation, whether for a fully featured animated video, motion graphics using 3D animation or logos and bumpers that can appear in multiple live-action videos.
- Take advantage of corporate events as places to capture video footage. Live streams, full-length panel discussion videos and behind-the-scenes clips all have value.
- Choose locations based on budget, because so many overhead costs depend on where you’re filming. Some cities simply cost less in terms of permitting and transportation.
These are the types of strategic moves expert video production companies can help you enact, and you can learn about them in greater detail on our blog.
Discover the value of remote video production, one of the leading ways to save money on video shoots.
Aim for Financially Sound Video Production This Year
Keeping video production quality and output high while controlling video production pricing is a worthy goal for your corporate media strategy. The right partner can help guide you to this objective, pairing you with an expert video production crew while adopting solutions that make sense of your brand’s overall mission and identity.
Crews Control is the No. 1 choice to help your company master low-cost, high-quality video production. In our over 30 years in the industry, we’ve delivered results for businesses of all sizes and industries, all around the world.
Read our eBook to uncover ways to reduce your video production expenses.
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