Before you price a video, price the problem

By Andrew Maclean

Plenty of businesses know they should be using video and have no idea where to begin. It can feel nebulous, and frankly a little bit scary, so the first conversation tends to start with the easy things to picture, like how long the film should be and who should be in it. Those matter, but they come later. Start with the problem the film has to solve, and then work out what that problem is already costing you.

Be frank about the problem

Maybe you’re struggling to win new business or to recruit good people. Or a competitor who says much the same as you gets noticed first, or a manager loses a week to induction every time somebody new starts. Whatever it is, be really frank with yourself about it, including the version you’d rather not say out loud in a meeting.

The problem decides almost everything that follows. It tells a production company who the film is for and what it has to make them do, and they can only help with the problem you’ve actually told them about.

Then put a number on it

Surprisingly few organisations put a number on theirs. In the CIPD’s latest survey of more than 1,000 HR professionals, published in September, only 19% said their organisation measures the return on what it spends on recruitment.

Recruitment shows why it’s worth the effort, because the advert and the agency are the small part of the bill. The CIPD puts the median cost of recruiting someone at £2,000, or £3,500 for a senior manager. Most of the cost arrives after the start date. When Oxford Economics studied staff turnover for the insurer Unum, replacing an employee earning £25,000 or more cost £30,614, and over £25,000 of that was lost output while the new person took an average of 28 weeks to get up to speed. The study is from 2014 and your figures will differ, but it shows where the money really goes.

If the problem is training, count the hours. The government’s Employer Skills Survey found that UK employers spent £1,700 per employee on training in 2024, for an average of 3.6 days each. A manager who gives the same induction every month is paying for that time again and again, and the evidence that people learn from video is good. One review of 105 randomised trials with nearly 7,800 university students found that adding video to existing teaching produced strong gains in learning. Even where video replaced other teaching outright, people still learned slightly more on average.

If it’s new business, work out what a good client is worth to you over a year, and how many you might be losing to a competitor who looks more established online. Bear in mind that most of your future clients aren’t buying yet. Research by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute with LinkedIn found that around 95% of business buyers aren’t in the market at any one time, and that 80% of companies change their bank only once every five years, so most of the people who might hire you in the next few years are forming their impression of you now, from whatever they can find.

This can be a bit depressing. Don’t stop there, because you now have the two pieces of the puzzle a production company needs, which are what the film has to fix and roughly what fixing it is worth.

What the number gives you

It gives you a sensible budget. A film that helps you make one good hire instead of two bad ones, or hands a manager back a couple of days a month, is easy to justify against figures like those, and a film that solves nothing is expensive at any price.

It also tells you whether the film worked. If the problem was applications, count them before and after, and if it was induction, count the hours. That’s rarer than it should be. When Gatekeeper Communications surveyed small businesses for its SME marketing report last year, one in five said they had no idea what was working.

Take it to a production company

You don’t need a finished brief. A short email saying what the problem is, who needs to see the film and what you think the problem is costing is enough to start. It’s free to have a production company read that, come back with ideas and give you a quote, so ask more than one and compare what they suggest. If you’d like a feel for the numbers first, we’ve set out how much video production costs at four different budgets.

A good production company will question the brief where it needs questioning. They’ll ask who signs the film off and what happens once it’s live, and if the problem doesn’t need a video at all, they should tell you.

Get more out of the day

With budgets being squeezed, ask what else the same shoot can give you. A good About Us film is useful, but it’s better still if the same day also gives you short social films cut to the right shape for each feed, cut-downs for particular customers, behind-the-scenes footage that shows recruits what you’re like, and B-roll for your next film. Plan all of it around the same problem and every piece pulls in the same direction.

The problem is already costing you something every month, whether or not anyone has added it up. So what is yours costing you?

About the author: Andrew Maclean is the founder of First Last Film, a video production company near Woodbridge making recruitment, training, brand and testimonial films for businesses, schools and charities across Suffolk and London.