A penny saved is a penny earned. A plain reading of that common phrase should lead you to a pretty obvious conclusion: If you ever meet someone named Penny (or Penelope or Peninsula), you should devote your life to ensuring their safety. Once you know they’re safe, pat yourself on the back because you’ve just earned yourself a new friend.
When you dig deeper, though, you may uncover that embedded in that saying is a lesson on financial success. It’s this secondary, practically nonsensical meaning that’s most relevant to your business, as developing a sound video strategy can reduce costs, save your company money, and ensure a higher ROI on your video marketing spend.
A Quick Video Strategy Explainer
Before we dive into the budget-saving importance of your video strategy, it may help to understand exactly what a video strategy is. At its core, a video strategy serves as the foundation of all video production and answers several essential questions:
- What are the goals for the video?
- Who is the video speaking to?
- Where will people see your video?
- What action do you want people to take upon seeing your video?
When you answer these questions, you’re creating a road map for your production. During moments of uncertainty, you’ll turn to your strategy document to guide the way.
Let’s say, though, that your company, CashFyre, is in the business of literally burning money and your CEO, CFO, and COO laugh maniacally every time you mention the earned value of a saved penny. Even then, a video content strategy will help your business. Here are three examples:
1. Take Advantage of Economies of Scale
Thinking strategically about your video production process will lower the upfront investment of video production because you can take advantage of economies of scale.
Almost every company out there deals with economies of scale for their products. They know if they produce more widgets, the cost to produce each individual one goes down.
However, economies of scale also let you use your production time more efficiently. Instead of renting a set for a couple of hours every few months to shoot a video, you can shoot multiple videos on one full day of shooting. Instead of paying the day rate for cast and crew every time you come up with a new idea for a video, you can strategize beforehand to make sure your company’s time and money are spent efficiently.
2. Prevent Duplicate Content
If your company is large enough or produces enough content, duplicated content can become an issue. For instance, perhaps the customer success department is creating an on-boarding video for new staff. However, the HR department may be doing the same thing. Adding to this scenario, you also have your marketing team shooting a video of your customer success team to create a more personal connection with your customers.
So, you’ve got three teams doing similar videos, and while you may appreciate the initiative, you probably don’t appreciate how much time and money has gone into duplicative work.
When your company creates and works from a singular source of video production truth, you can help prevent these issues. Even if two teams are working on separate videos, your strategy will enable them to work collaboratively instead of in self-sealed silos of ignorance. Your marketing team’s video could provide footage for the onboarding video or vice-versa. It’s a real-world example of teamwork making the dream work.
3. Set Appropriate Timeline and Budget Expectations
Creating video is a real production. There are multiple moving parts moving in parallel, and that makes it easy to miss deadlines or go over budget – which is why hiring an experienced video producer may help you avoid those issues.
Beyond putting someone in charge of production, though, a video strategy will let you set a realistic timeline and budgetary expectations that help you save money.
Questions of when certain deliverables are needed and how the video will ultimately be shown to its intended audience should all be defined by the video strategy. This lets you work backward from the ultimate due date to set attainable timelines and budgets.
A classic B2C example of this would be holiday-based marketing. Likely, all advertising will need to roll out before Thanksgiving to ensure consumers are aware of the product before they start rampaging through department stores or cruising their way across multiple e-tailers. That means the video itself may need to be ready by early November. This, in turn, means that you’ll need to enter post-production in October and that means that the actual production of the video needs to be done a few weeks before that.
Your video strategy will also help prevent you from paying for things before you need them. Instead of spending part of the year paying for a video hosting platform before you have any video to upload, you can wait to pay for server access until you have something produced.
The Bottom Line: A Video Strategy Ensures You’re Making the Right Videos
When you think of your video strategy as a roadmap, it’s easy to see how it saves you money. Instead of driving down dead ends, taking the wrong turn and doubling back, or spending an eternity driving round and round a traffic circle as you desperately shout out your window “I don’t know where to exit! I’m so scared,” you can instead proceed down an intended path and easily navigate obstacles as they arise.
That is, a video strategy lowers costs by providing you with a detailed plan. With your strategy in hand, you’ll avoid conflicting content, duplicative videos, and missed deadlines.
For more on how a video strategy can save your company money, check out episode 56 of The Video Reformation podcast.