Why it’s Important to Know Your Budget For a Corporate Video

Money really can be one of the hardest things to discuss when it comes to B2B services. But we don’t think it should be this way. And it’s all related to trust. Here’s why this is, and why it’s important that budgets and expectations get discussed as early as possible when it comes to corporate video.

When we speak to clients about a new project, whether they’re existing clients or new ones, it’s important we try and understand what the budget is. So why are so many of the companies we speak to hesitant to tell us what budget they have in mind? Here are the main reasons:

1. They haven’t thought about it yet. This is fine – but tell us, that way we can give you examples of what you will get for different budget levels.
2. They think that if they tell us a budget, and it’s higher than the job needs to cost, we will quote them an amount that’s in-line with their budget and making huge margins on it. It’s about trust – even if you’ve never worked with this video producer before, do your research into them so you can at least be confident you’re not going to get ripped off.
3. They don’t want ideas to be restricted by budget and want to know what they can get for different amount of monies before getting budget approved. Again, this is fine, but tell us as it’s not fair to have a producer to a huge amount of work if there’s no budget approved yet.
4. Embarrassment. It might sound strange, but sometimes clients want to avoid a situation where they have to say they cannot afford what they want from a video.

If people don’t want to share their budget, we will normally try and approach the issue in a number of different ways:

1. Saying we will come back with two proposals at two price-points, giving and indication of the range that those points will be, and checking whether that will be in-line what the client wants.
2. Giving examples of what previous videos in a similar vein to what this new client wants, and stating approximately what those previous videos cost. The new client can then say which previous video is in line with what they’re after, without having to say explicitly what they want to spend.
3. Explaining a bit more about what can push the cost of videos up and down. We’ve written more about this previously split by video type and linked to from this table.

So what does all of the above mean, really?

If you’ve already worked out what you want to spend, then please do tell us (or whoever you’re talking to about producing a video for you). You can always ask us to give you 2 or 3 different options at different price points so you can see what you’ll get if you spend slightly less. For us, the important thing is maximising what you get in return for whatever you spend, regardless of how much you spend.

Whatever video we’re producing for our clients, it’s important to us that we deliver value. But this doesn’t mean we deliver ‘cheap’ videos. What we want to do is ensure that more of a client’s budget ends up on screen in their final video than it might otherwise do. We are a lean operation without big expensive overheads, the costs of which are covered by our clients’ video budgets. We scale up and scale down on a job by job basis, so you only pay for what your project requires.

So whether you know what you want to spend, or you want to find out what costs what in the world of corporate video, please get in touch and one of our team will be happy to have a chat with you.

We just ask one thing – be honest with us, as we will always be honest with you.