When we got together recently for a roundtable with our partners at Igloo Creative House, we wanted to help marketers understand and solve the top roadblocks standing between you and video content success.
We’ve seen a lot of tech brands trying out video marketing and honestly, it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, the results are downright disappointing. And if those first couple of video projects don’t work out—maybe you’re trying to create a quick product demo or tutorial—it can be tough to justify the expense of continuing, especially if it takes time away from your marketers’ core tasks.
In the first post in this series, we looked at two of the major challenges facing tech marketers when it comes to video: winning over the practitioner audience (and how audiences have changed over the years thanks to bottom-up adoption) and picking the right video type.
Knowing which types of video content you can create, and which work best for which audiences is crucial to making video content generate ROI.
But that’s not enough.
In this post, we’ll explore ways to bring down the cost of video marketing while also increasing revenue. Together, that can boost your ROI and make video marketing actually start paying for itself.
Ready to start succeeding in tech video marketing? Let’s dive in…
The Secret to Tech Video Marketing ROI
Here in the real world, businesses succeed based on shrewd, strategic business decisions, including spending decisions. Projects that don’t carry their weight won’t last long.
Tech marketing videos come with a price tag. And you have to justify that expense to others within your organization in order to keep going. So you need to prove that videos are also generating ROI.
As we saw in the first post, ROI is a supremely simple calculation:
ROI = net income ÷ cost of investment × 100
It’s easy to see from this that there are two ways to increase ROI: bring down the cost of investment or raise that net income number.
And if you can accomplish both, you’ll hold the key to getting the most value out of every single video project.
Up next, we share our tips for cutting costs (bringing down the cost of investment in tech video marketing to drive up ROI) plus tips for driving even more revenue from a single video (bringing up net income to drive up ROI). This can open up new avenues of possibility and help your video marketing pay for itself.
3 Ways to Cut Costs for Tech Video Production
Here are three ways that you can start saving money while still creating high-quality, professional tech marketing videos:
1. Record It Yourself
Some tech video types lend themselves naturally to DIY.
For example, tutorial videos are a natural. Just get an expert like a product lead to sit down and record themselves walking through key features and workflows. Everybody has access to a camera and screen recorder, and while it might need a couple of takes to get the footage just right, it’s not complicated and won’t take very long, either.
(Hint: Even if your expert knows the product inside and out, it can help to write a script, or at least point-form notes, so they know exactly what is and isn’t going into the video.)
Another format that lends itself naturally to DIY production is a talking-head video.
These can be used to establish thought leadership, such as a video of your CEO, CTO, or some other leader within your organization. An interview format may be more engaging than just having them talking to the camera. Have someone else from your organization ask them questions about any area they want to discuss, whether that’s cybersecurity or the future of fintech (or both!).
Talking-head videos can also serve as great social proof, like a quick interview clip with a satisfied client. It’s hard to track down clients in person; one efficient way to do this is by creating a private space at your conference or trade show booth. That way, you can plan to meet customers and then duck in and record a few sound bites while they’re there. These are precious, and you can reuse them in a number of ways once you have the video recorded.
For other video types, you will want more of a professional feel than you can create on your own. For example, explainer videos are generally only a couple of minutes long and feature animation and music. When every second counts, you may need a professional to help you get the message across quickly and compellingly.
2. Find Freebies
Free goes so much further today than it did even a few years ago, whether that’s free tools, free-to-use stock footage, or free tutorials that can get your team up to speed quickly.
We can’t list every single resource out there, but there are a number of categories where you’ll find high-quality free, freemium, or lower-cost alternatives.
- Free stock footage and music libraries
- Basic video editing tools (and even more advanced tools; sometimes these are free to get started, with premium add-ons for an additional cost)
- Screen recording tools to help create tutorials, product demos, or software walkthroughs
- Online video creation tools help you quickly create professional-looking videos on your own
Free resources do come with trade-offs. If a video editing suite is free but extremely difficult to use without a large community of users (or Redditors) to help you master it, your time may end up eating up all the savings of going with a free tool.
And it goes without saying that you’ll want to double-check up front that a free tool will do everything you need it to do. Some may add watermarks, for example, which is unacceptable on a business video, limit your final video length, or forbid commercial use. So read all the fine print before you invest any time learning the tool’s ins and outs.
Free tools and resources are also a great way to drive through an affordable proof of concept that could lead to bigger, full funded projects later on.
3. Discover AI Tools
There are both free and paid AI tools out there that can help you at every stage of video production, from creating a script to adding music and animations.
The scene is constantly changing, but we’ve put together a couple of lists (here and here) rounding up a few of our favorite tools to simplify and elevate your tech video production. Obviously, AI can’t do it all. But this field has come a long way just in the last two years and it’s sure to advance rapidly in the years to come.
There’s still lots that AI can’t do for you, however.
When you do need a human touch, for video editing, for example, or to create an original animated intro or outro that you’ll reuse across multiple videos, you can find affordable options on a freelance site like Fiverr.
As IOD CEO Ofir Nachmani commented:
“You can create a tutorial, for example, cheaply and easily, and that’s okay. But if you take it one step further, invest a small amount of money, you can build a template… that you can use going forward for a series of tutorials that will be more appealing.”
Getting the Most Out of Every Single Video
If you scroll back up to that ROI equation, the other way to create ROI from tech video production is to increase revenue from each video.
The number-one way to do that—maximizing your investment in video production—is to repurpose your videos.
You can reuse and repurpose videos in multiple ways—the sky really is the limit here. (Pro tip: you should actually be repurposing every type of marketing content you’re creating!)
For example, let’s say you’ve created a 3-minute explainer video, like this managed storage service explainer for AWS that IOD created for NetApp.
As IOD Head of Video Marketing Gur Tirosh explained:
“What we did once the video was finished was split it up into several ‘micro’ explainers of under one minute; such as one micro explainer providing a general introduction to enterprise-grade storage services for AWS, and another on achieving storage efficiencies and AWS cost savings.”
Once you split up a longer video, you’re free to share the micro explainers via social media, greet site visitors, embed in emails, and more in order to spread your message out to more users and places than the original video could reach.
Bonus Tip: Getting the Right Processes in Place
A well-oiled content machine is the secret to producing compelling video content at scale. To achieve that, you’ll need a range of capabilities and team members in place before you begin.
This includes:
- Marketing: Strategy, editorial calendar planning, project managers
- Story phase: Tech expertise, creative writers
- Video phase: Producers, animators, narrators, editors, sound pros
- Post-release: Tracking performance & ROI
As Co-Founder and CEO of Igloo Creative House Dan Sela noted explains:
“The minimum video production team should include a creative director who can prepare a brief and come up with a vision and what the video should look like, and a videoboarder to work on the first sketch of the video. It’s important to come up with a quick result just to have a better understanding of how the messaging comes across and… to make sure everyone is happy before moving ahead with the production. You need a graphic designer or an illustrator with the right speciality in motion design, an animator, a sound designer, and of course a producer who will be in charge of coordinating the whole orchestra, which is also a key person for bringing production at scale.
You may have dedicated team members in some of these roles already. Others can be brought on board temporarily on a per-project basis. Inexpensive freelancers through a site like Fiverr or Upwork is another appealing option.
It can be a challenge to get subject-matter experts (SMEs) on board for a marketing project, and we offer a wealth of tips for working productively with SMEs in our ebook, 7 Best Practices for Producing Tech Marketing Content at Scale.
Once you have your winning team, you’ll also need to create smooth, seamless processes to take your production from end to end—hassle free.
Here’s what that content production pipeline might look like in a typical tech business:
Before we wrap up, here’s one final word of wisdom from our video marketing pros:
You’re not creating a single video, you’re building a template that will simplify all your future video marketing.
At IOD, we actually call this “templatizing.” Meaning that once you have all the elements of successful video creation in place, coupled with previous examples of the key types of video you’ll be creating (explainers, demos, and tutorials), video production becomes:
- Easier—all team members know what to do at each stage
- Cheaper—you’re reusing elements wherever possible
- More effective—as you iterate and learn what works you’ll see better and better results
As Sela notes, “Templatizing the video production process will allow you to produce at scale and support your marketers with the ammo they need to boost performance.”
Whenever you create a video, keep track of which tools you use along with any tips and tricks for getting the most out of them. When you hit on something that works especially well, make a note for next time so you won’t have to look it up every single time. (If you try something and it doesn’t work, note that down as well so you can learn from your mistakes next time!)
Remember that every video is a template that you can reuse (to some extent) the next time you’re creating a video of the same type.
For example, if you’re creating a tutorial, save all your source files for images (logos, headshots, backdrops, filters), audio (background music, sound effects, voiceover), and video (animations, screen recordings, stock footage). That way, you can plug in new segments quickly once they’re recorded and have a brand-new video in much less time.
It’s all part of your well-oiled tech video content production machine so that your team can produce video more quickly and easily while bringing in more revenue from each video at the same time.
Tech Video Content That Delivers Results
As one IOD client recently discovered, video content really can pay for itself.
Within a very short span of time, this cybersecurity decacorn looking to ramp up its library of video marketing content, was able to achieve massive growth in organic traffic and SEO, along with leads and conversions, while also further establishing brand leadership within its industry.
With deep experience producing video content for leading tech brands like NetApp, Zoho, and Wiz, IOD’s team includes:
- Subject-matter experts to get your tech just right
- Tech marketing writers and tech editors who understand your field
- Creative video producers, animators, and sound technicians
- Your own dedicated project manager to take your video from start to finish on time and under budget
Check out IOD’s end-to-end tech video marketing services or book your free video consult today.
About IOD
Serving some of the most well-respected brands in cloud, DevOps, data engineering, cybersecurity, and AI, IOD produces meaningful tech content at scale that strengthens your brand and converts traffic into quality leads.
IOD’s agile teams of vetted tech experts and professional editors work together to build you a rich content library: animated explainer videos, technical blogs, demos and video tutorials, white papers, ebooks, tutorials, product comparisons, thought leadership, and more.
Discover how IOD can help your business strategically scale up tech content to drive conversions.
About Igloo Creative House
Part of the Magic Media group, Igloo Creative House specializes in animation videos that tell the stories of brilliant people, products, and brands. The Magic Media group is a media and tech start-up powered by creativity and innovation with a physical presence in 14 countries and expertise in art, animation, game development, video production, VFX, and more.
