Getting more value from video doesn’t necessarily mean spending less.
It means making sure that the money you do spend produces something genuinely useful, and thinking about everything you might need before the cameras come out.
Sometimes that means making one really good film. Sometimes it means capturing enough material in one day to create content for the next three months.
The important thing is to plan for it.
Start with what you actually need
Before thinking about filming, I want to understand what you’re trying to achieve, who you need to reach and where the content is going to be used.
That might sound familiar if you’ve read some of my other guides, but there’s a reason I keep coming back to it.
Without those answers, it’s very easy to spend money making content you don’t actually need.
Trying to cram five different messages into one film is a good example. It can feel like you’re getting more for your money, but you often end up with one film that doesn’t do any of those jobs particularly well.
Equally, producing a beautiful film with no real plan for how people are going to see it isn’t particularly good value either.
The aim isn’t to create as much content as possible. It’s to create the right content and make the most of the opportunity to capture it.
One filming day can produce a lot of content
Some projects naturally lend themselves to creating content in batches.
Imagine you run a restaurant or pub and want regular material for social media. Rather than organising a separate shoot every time you need something, we could spend a day capturing different parts of the business.
We might film dishes being prepared, short interviews with the people behind them, customers talking about their experience, behind-the-scenes activity and plenty of general footage of the venue.
That one shoot could potentially give us ten or fifteen individual pieces of content to release gradually over the following weeks or months.
You’re still investing in professional filming and editing, but you’re making much more efficient use of the time we’re on location.
Make more of things that are already happening
Events are another good example.
If you’ve brought together interesting speakers, customers, experts or people from across your industry, there’s potentially a huge amount of useful knowledge in the room.
Instead of treating the event as something that happens once and disappears, we can capture some of that.
A presentation could become several shorter clips. Interviews with speakers could create additional content. Footage from the day might be useful for promoting the following year’s event.
In effect, the contributors have already done much of the hard work by developing the ideas and presentations. The opportunity is to capture that knowledge while everybody is together and turn it into something with a much longer life.
Sometimes spending a little more creates much more value
There is a limit to how much one person with one camera can capture.
If I’m filming a speaker on stage, for example, I can’t necessarily be somewhere else at exactly the same time filming audience reactions or activity elsewhere at the event.
That’s where spending a little more can make sense.
Bringing in an additional camera operator might increase the production cost, but if it allows us to capture substantially more useful material from an opportunity that only happens once, it can be money well spent.
The same applies elsewhere. Adding another interview while we’re already set up may be relatively inexpensive. Returning for another separate filming day is obviously less so.
Getting good value isn’t about stripping the production back to the cheapest possible version. It’s about deciding where spending a little more will give you something genuinely useful in return.
One interview can tell more than one story
Getting more from a shoot doesn’t necessarily mean simply chopping a long video into lots of short ones.
Sometimes it starts with the questions we ask.
On the PACCo environmental project, for example, I was creating films that needed to communicate with different audiences. The same interview could include more technical questions for one audience alongside questions about community impact or the wider story for another.
By thinking about those different audiences before filming, the material could then be shaped into different films afterwards.
That’s much more effective than conducting an interview for one purpose and discovering six months later that you wish you’d asked three more questions.
This is why planning matters. Video is a rich form of media and the material captured during a production can often be turned into different edits and assets afterwards. Pasted text
Think about how long the content needs to last
A lot of business video can remain useful for several years if it’s planned carefully.
I’ve had clients reuse the same core content across campaigns over an extended period, and gradually building a library of good evergreen material can be a very effective approach. Pasted text
Sometimes longevity comes down to surprisingly small decisions.
If you’re filming something in autumn but want to use it throughout the following spring and summer, do we want the interview taking place outside surrounded by fallen leaves? Perhaps an indoor location would make the finished film less obviously seasonal.
The same applies to interviews. References to particular dates, current events or things that are about to happen can unnecessarily shorten the useful life of otherwise evergreen content.
Not everything needs to last forever, of course. A film promoting an event on a particular date doesn’t need to be evergreen.
The point is simply to decide before filming how long you want the content to remain useful.
Don’t forget what happens after the edit
One of the easiest ways to waste a video budget is to spend all the money making the film and none of the time thinking about what happens next.
Uploading it to YouTube isn’t a distribution strategy.
Neither is putting it somewhere deep within your website and hoping people stumble across it.
If the film is intended to generate new business, how are potential customers going to encounter it? Could it form part of a paid campaign? Does your sales team need it? Should it be sent to your existing customer base? Does it belong prominently on a particular page of your website?
You don’t necessarily need a large advertising budget. But you do need some idea of how the content is going to reach the people it was made for.
Think about the whole investment
The best way to get more from your video budget is usually to think beyond the individual film.
What else is happening while we’re filming? What other stories could we capture? Could the same interview serve more than one audience? Could one filming day provide several months of content? Is there something we could do differently to make the material useful for longer?
And, just as importantly, what are you actually going to do with everything once it’s finished?
Sometimes the right answer is one focused film. Sometimes it’s ten or fifteen pieces of content captured together. Sometimes spending a little more during production saves considerably more later.
The important thing is to make those decisions before we start filming, rather than discovering the opportunities afterwards.