If you’ve read our ‘Why video marketing works and stats to prove it’ and haven’t skipped lunch in favour of building out your video marketing strategy, then it’s probably for one of the following reasons:
It’s true that embarking on any video project is going to need a commitment – but not as much as people think. Any agency worth their salt shouldn’t be asking for oodles of your time because it means they’ve missed the mark and you’re left picking up the pieces.
Henry Ford put it best; “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” The role of an agency is to unlock the depths of your knowledge and experience then guide you through a clear process to achieve your goal for the video. After the initial Discovery session, you’ll only need to feedback at key milestones like script, style, storyboard and animation.
Whilst there’s a myriad of ways to prove ROI once your video is live, making the case for video at the outset can be a little trickier. It’s not so much about proving that video can work (unless they’ve been living under a rock), it’s more a case of proving that the budget you want to spend is going to deliver for you.
No (sane) marketer wants to risk going low (because how often does cheap deliver great?), but equally, you can go too high – blowing the budget on one video, where several could have delivered significantly greater ROI.
A simple rule of thumb is to be clear about your expectations of quality (or that of your stakeholders). Collect examples of videos you really like and find out how much they cost to produce. That way you can be confident in the output and can reverse engineer your ROI from the price tag.
Yep, we feel you. We did the same when choosing our marketing agency. It’s so hard to choose when you don’t get to see the end ‘product’ until your cheque has been cashed. Some companies ask agencies to produce creative up front, but this is a fallacy.
Firstly, what does it say about an agency if they have their top creatives just waiting around to pitch? And secondly, said agency should be spending a significant amount of the budget getting to grips with the project – if not they are just ideas without any grounding.
Instead, challenge the agency to show they understand what it is you want to communicate. If they ask those kinds of deep, probing questions that make you feel slightly uncomfortable (because you’d never considered that angle), then there’s a good chance they’ll be both capable and highly invested in the project.
The really good agencies will be as selective about who they work with as you are.
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