Online videos on a budget
Online videos are great for digital marketing. But they can definitely be more expensive than most other online options. The rule of thumb in the past has been to plan on $1,000 per minute of video!
So if you can’t afford that, are you stuck with amateur-looking videos on your smart phone?
Full disclosure: we’ve recently begun offering video services. But that doesn’t mean we’re a good fit for everyone. While we tend to not run $1,000 per minute of video, your budget may be even lower.
So what are some other options out there?
Fiverr
Fiverr has a whole section of their services called Video & Animation. While most of the video services there are definitely lower quality, take into account the price, number of stars, and number of ratings to help you pick.
We’ve even experimented a bit with Fiverr videos. You can see the two we had made below. The quality is decent, but they were definitely working with one specific format, and couldn’t really vary from that.
Prezi
If you’re in the mood to do it yourself, you can use software like Prezi to create videos that go beyond the typical slideshow you’d see in most meetings. You can even add background music to give it that additional pop.
Again, way before we started offering video services (and back when we were still called T&S Web Design), we made a video by going this route. I even wrote a blog article way back in 2013 on How to get your Prezi on YouTube. But I believe there are some third party tools and services that can do this now as well.
You can see our video we created on Prezi below.
Screen capture
Depending on your industry, videos with screen capture may make sense for you. For the last few years, we’ve created WordPress training videos both for our clients and as value-added marketing.
You can see in the older video below that we did utilize a professional to film an introduction and ending to the video, but the audio quality wasn’t great in the screenshots. We definitely recommend investing in a decent microphone, which we had not done at the time.
The audio didn’t seem to affect the popularity of the screen capture video below. Tim made it back in 2012, and it demonstrated how to add a company to LinkedIn in 3 minutes. The video ended up with over 18,000 views.
Edit it yourself
Of course, you can make certain types of videos and edit them yourself with good results. Years ago, before I was part of the T&S team, they had a printer die, and decided to create a spoof of the scene in Office Space where they demolish a printer in a field.
The video was filmed on Flip camera and the video was edited together on iMovie. If we made this today using comparable tools, we probably would have used a smart phone and Camtasia.
The result wasn’t always quite that good, though. The following was a company culture video we created that didn’t end up with quite as good of a final result as we’d hoped.
We can’t fault the person who did it, as she did the excellent Office Space spoof as well!
Hire a professional
Okay, I’m a bit biased here. Those other options are almost definitely cheaper than hiring us to help with your videos. But it’s amazing what a difference it makes to invest just a little more to have a professional help. I’ll leave you with a couple videos we published earlier this year so you can see the difference.