Promoting innovative projects with videos has long become a golden standard of the tech industry. Videos enable startups to save time for their potential customers while giving them tools to explain the essence of their solution to audiences. Moreover, if produced intelligently, promo videos can be used for various commercial purposes, saving marketing costs.
With the video advertising market reaching around €175bn in 2024, video-based promo campaigns have the highest ROI among other forms of advertisement—and over 92% of marketers are satisfied with it.
Presented on social media, within landing pages, or through offline channels such as conferences or presentations, promo videos grab attention and help tech business marketers reach conversions.
In this article, our team helps you plan your video-based campaigns accurately and consider the video production budget. So, be your own video production cost estimator, and let’s dive deeper into the topic.
5 factors influencing the cost of your video marketing campaigns
Video-based promo campaigns come in different forms. You can use videos at any stage of your sales funnel and reach much better results than similar but no-video marketing activities. However, suppose your budget is limited, or you are new to video marketing in general. In that case, it’s better to start with the top stage of your sales funnel (Awareness) and try to reach as many potential customers as possible.
Any video-based marketing budget includes management, content production, and distribution. In addition, before actually starting your campaign, you must gain a clear vision of how you will measure and evaluate your results. That’s why most marketing project budgets also include expenses connected to analytics. Among all of those categories, video production has the highest influence on your final budget.
You may explore with the video production cost estimator that there are 4 factors that affect the video production budget:
- Complexity of a video format;
- Video content length;
- Intensity of actions and number of scenes;
- Additional parameters (localization, creating shorts, resizing, buying licenses for music, stock video, or other ready-to-use digital assets, etc.).
At the example of Blue Carrot, they dedicated a year to creating animated videos for various clients, including digital startups and SaaS projects. For you to better understand how a budget for marketing videos is formed, we’ll use examples from our area. In particular, the complexity of your video is about its visual style, story, and genre (cutout, 2D, 3D, whiteboard, or video with live-action quotes)
Minimalist whiteboard animation featuring schemes and texts is easy and cheap to produce. At the same time, futuristic 3D motion graphics with multiple locations and characters are expensive and require time. The price difference may exceed three times or $4000.
Video formats to leverage promo campaigns as a tech startup
The complete list of video types a digital business can use in their campaigns includes classic commercials, educational series, testimonials, client video reviews, product overviews, entertaining branded content, behind-the-scenes shorts, case studies, corporate stories, and many others.
Let’s dig deeper into 3 most popular formats that have higher chances to bring you conversions at the top sales funnel stage.
Promo.
A video of this type is used to promote your solution directly to customers. It is focused on listing the advantages of your product and ends with a clear call to action, which is either to buy from you right away or to register on your website. Promo videos are often short—up to 40 seconds.
Video explainer.
This video is about going deeper into how and why your product works. It often starts with a client’s problem and gradually evolves around its possible solution with your product. Explainer videos end with an invitation to visit a website or social media page.
The most significant advantage of an explainer video is its flexibility. You can use the same video for multiple sales funnel stages and leverage it as promo or re-engagement content. On average, explainers are over 60 seconds long.
Branded content.
Non-promotional branded content aims to gain users’ trust and loyalty to you as a source of useful or simply entertaining information and simultaneously get them involved in your product.
Study series on YouTube, how-to’s for Instagram, and clips based on user-generated content with native product advertising are what this content is about. It can be short or long depending on your budget and commercial goal. However, in 2024, short videos (under 30 seconds) perform best.
Wrapping up. How to reduce video marketing expenses
Video content is essential for promoting tech solutions due to their complexity and non-material nature. At the same time, not all startups have an opportunity to invest in regular multimedia content production for marketing purposes.
If your marketing budget is limited, focus on creating videos to help you raise brand awareness and make more users enter your sales funnel. More flexible formats, such as explainers and promos, enable you to work with several communication channels simultaneously and reach more potential customers.
Outsourcing video creation is another way to save money on your video-based marketing campaigns. By working with an experienced animation studio that can execute full-cycle production, you can get videos faster and avoid costly mistakes like choosing the wrong format or style.
