|
Interesting information! I really like the analysis of video content, particularly the "founder presence" info. However, I think that the headline results that isolate video cost when looking at raise results is a bit of an odd way to do this analysis because it leaves out the rest of the marketing mix. I'm actually preparing a crowdfunding campaign myself (first time), and I'd think that the main levers for success would be, in no order of importance: A: Pre-campaign support (solid email list, social media presence, etc), B: Video Quality, C: Rest of Page quality (ie: copy, visuals, etc), D: Paid advertising, E: Media Coverage, F: (Most important) Compelling product & pricepoint Money Raised should be a function of a-f (and several other factors I'm sure I'm missing) so isolating any one of those variables on its own is not that useful. Presumably a campaign with a $100k budget for its video has also made significant investments elsewhere. Something I'm still trying to figure out: assuming there is a limited budget, would one rather spend 20k on a video or 5k on the video + 15k more on Facebook ads? My thinking is that the 3M extra views (assuming $5 cpm) would be worth more than the marginal increase in video quality from $5k-$20k. Granted, if there's a good ROI on online ads, the budget there should theoretically be "unlimited", but that's not always the case. Curious about other peoples thoughts here. |
Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective, it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse frames from the video for the page.
So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote more about this here https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video...