We often come across clients who know the value that video content will bring to their brand, but are not able to get videos produced because they can’t secure enough budget. If you’ve found yourself in a similar position, fear not, there’s an easy way out.
Share the cost
Do what a few of our customers have done and split the cost of video production between yourself and your suppliers. This is an easy win/win solution because your suppliers get video content for half the price, and your brand gets the increased connectivity and engagement that video brings.
Video is one of the best tools around to increase conversion rates. If you’re working in a partnership with your suppliers then it’s a no brainer to share the cost of video reviews for the products that you are selling. After all, you both have exactly the same end goal which is to sell more.
Streamline your production
A lot of people don’t associate wholesaling with videos, but – just like with wholesalers – video done at scale yields some incredible reductions in cost.
If you spend enough time in pre-production and plan a video shoot well, you can get enough professionally-filmed video content to last you a year. Some of our customers hire out a studio and crew for a week and get 100 professional videos out of it.
What it means is that videos that would traditionally be in the thousands of dollars to produce, end up costing only a few hundred because of those economies of scale.
Imagine if you then split those few hundred dollars with your suppliers and start getting beautifully polished videos that are costing you double digits to produce!
Pass on the cost
Some of our customers have seen conversion rates quadruple on their site because of our video content. If video is getting that sort of results for your brand then it would be silly to split the cost with your suppliers.
At that stage, it becomes a no brainer to have the whole production funded by your suppliers – as it will be incredibly beneficial to them for you to sell more of their stuff over their competitor’s.
Video reduces bounce rates as it holds people’s attention on a product for longer. This means they are more likely to purchase a product with video and if you can communicate this competitive edge to suppliers then it becomes easy for them to fund the video. Especially if they use your video asset on their own channels.
Make a profit
The next level in this journey (and again, it has been done by some of our customers) is to make a profit out of your outsourced video production company. As long as your customers are getting value – everyone is a winner. The key with this strategy is to measure video impact on your site. Not necessarily through engagement levels or amount of views but with a solid ROI measurement.
One of our preferred video partners, Office Hub, have successfully implemented this strategy as they have had some staggering results with video that they can easily communicate to their clients: Listings with videos receive 54 per cent more views and 17 per cent more enquiries than those without.
We recommend that you set up your Google Analytics account to concretely show the impact of video on sales. This also works best when you are producing video at scale so that the price remains reasonable to your suppliers.
Michael Langdon, Founder, Serious Levity and author of “Welcome to the age of Emotion: How to attract and connect with customers using video”
