Allocating money when putting together your marketing budget for the year can be tough – how do you determine what budget will cultivate the right video content mix for your viewers and increase sales?
As web video is exploding –in view time, influence, reach – now where many brands are shifting their spends towards digital marketing. The time is now to reallocate your budget to stand out from your competitors and see success. Read on and learn how!
Consider, for example, that YouTube overall – and even YouTube on mobile alone – reaches more 18-49 year olds than any cable network in the U.S1. Because of this growth, we at FIM thought it might be helpful to create an example of how a person or company might create a budget to take advantage of the changing marketing landscape.
Developing your brand’s video marketing strategy and budget will come down to two main factors: what type of video you want/need and how much money you are able to to spend. Keep in mind that there are thousands of people creating high-quality videos on small budgets (or even no budget at all). A larger budget doesn’t necessarily help if it isn’t the right content mix which engages your audience so a strategic plan based on research is crucial.
In addition to thinking through video production, keep in mind to allocate spend towards distribution of the content, whether you are a B2B or B2C company. The right distribution strategy drives the ROI of the video and will fail if only put on a website or YouTube channel.
Budget Creation Case Study
- Total Finances: For this scenario, let’s imagine that “ABC Company” has $50,000 to launch its video marketing campaign. This will help to determine the types and amount of videos that will be feasible for them to make for their strategy. For most campaigns, we like to suggest a mix of one or two higher-budget videos to use for brand promotions (such as a company profile) and a series of three smaller awareness-based videos (more focused on the specific product or service you offer). The goal is to produce a series of strategically produced videos that provide content your audience wants to see and your sales team needs in order to push them through the sales funnel to ultimately tie back to revenue.
- Video Selection: In our example, ABC Company has chosen to make one higher-budget branding video and a series of four smaller customer-testimonial and product-education videos. Now that they know what kind of video content they want, they’ll need to decide the best way to use the budget. A good rule of thumb in dividing up your budget is to spend nearly half on marketing as you spend on video production. In this case, since Company A has a $50K budget, they decide to put $30K towards production and $20K towards the marketing of the videos they make.
- Marketing Goals: To figure out how to spend their $20K promotional and marketing budget, ABC Company decided that their main goal was to generate new customer leads, so they chose to dedicate two-thirds of the marketing budget to paid search on Facebook and Google These campaigns are geo-targeted to the very niche audience they have – even down to the zip code they want to target. They then decided to split up the remaining third for social media promotion and an email campaign to encourage shares and click-throughs from their already loyal customers.
- Tracking and Revising: The last step of the budgeting process (and an important one) is to monitor and adjust where the money is going as the campaign progresses. You (or video marketing partner) should analyze results, measure success, and work with your team to build best practice video content and results toward your marketing and sale objectives. Once you see the analytics, you can determine elements such as optimal length of the videos and even determine what type of content your audience is connecting with the most. ABC Company decided to do the majority of its paid search promotion in the first two months of their campaign and then switched gears at the end of the campaign to push out a big email marketing promotion to assess how the videos did and to close any remaining leads.
The most important thing to remember is that your video marketing budget, like
ABC Company, is meant to best fit your company’s needs even as the campaign
is progressing. If something isn’t working, then make a change. That’s the beauty of digital marketing. You can receive instant feedback on the success
of your campaign in progress. Good luck out there, marketers!
1 Google-commissioned Nielsen study (U.S.), December 2013-February 2015