Tips for pricing corporate video work

Whether your are producing your own content or outsourcing your efforts, it helps to know the true price of a video. Consider these insights.

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Video production can be complex and difficult to price if it’s not your specialty.

It’s always good to get a perspective from outside your bubble, so you’ll have a better idea of what to do. Creating video, like other marketing other communications services, is a complex and nuanced task.

If you want the video to help your clients “move the needle” with storytelling their customers will love, the stakes are high. Audiences will judge your client’s brand or business based on your video’s quality of messaging and production value.

You have to get it right, but you don’t want to overspend.

All minutes are not created equal

A common mistake is when people quote their clients on a per-minute commodity-style price for the video. For example: “A great video will cost you $4,000 a minute.”

This pricing model hasn’t been accurate since the 1980s. The only video agencies who quote by the minute are the ones who still shoot in Betacam. Quoting this way assumes that every minute of video is created equal.

Today’s audiences have much higher expectations for storytelling and production quality—and much shorter attention spans.

How do you estimate cost?

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