Video Marketing
Video wins where text cannot, and costs more everywhere else
Nobody runs out of video ideas. They run out of capacity to shoot, edit, caption and publish them. We plan video around what you can actually produce every month, and we say plainly where a written page would have done the job for a fraction of the money.
Settle this first
Where video earns its cost, and where a page does the job better
Video is not a better version of writing. It is a different instrument, and the fastest way to waste a video budget is to use it on messages that a written page handles more cheaply and more usefully.
| Dimension | Video is the stronger format | Writing is the stronger format |
|---|---|---|
| Type of message | Anything physical, spatial or procedural — how a thing is installed, how a room looks, how a person behaves in a consultation | Anything conditional or numeric — pricing structures, specifications, eligibility rules, comparisons a buyer needs to re-read |
| What it is doing for the buyer | Building confidence in people and craft, which is hard to establish in prose | Letting someone find the one line that answers their question without watching four minutes for it |
| How it is consumed | Linearly, often in a feed, frequently with no sound | Scanned, searched within, copied, forwarded and re-read |
| Cost of a correction | High — a changed fact usually means a re-shoot or a visible edit | Low — the sentence is amended and republished the same day |
| How it is found later | Through platform recommendation, embeds and search results that surface video | Through ordinary search, and through AI systems that read text far more reliably than they read footage |
| Where it usually goes wrong | One expensive film and nothing to publish for the rest of the quarter | Pages that read like documentation nobody was persuaded by |
The real constraint
The bottleneck is capacity, not ideas
Every video plan we are shown begins with a list of concepts. Almost none begins with the number of hours a month the business can give to being filmed, reviewing cuts and approving them. That number decides everything, and when it is left out the plan collapses somewhere around week six, usually blamed on a lack of ideas.
So we start there. How many people are willing to be on camera. How often they can be in the same place. Who has to approve a cut and how long they take. Whether legal or compliance sees anything before it goes out. From that we get a realistic ceiling, and we plan under it rather than over it.
Planning under the ceiling changes what gets made. A business with four filming hours a month should not be commissioning a documentary series; it should be batching, shooting several formats in one sitting, and building a small library it can draw on. A business with a customer-facing team already comfortable on camera can run something far more ambitious. Neither answer is better. They are answers to different questions about capacity.
It also changes the honesty of the conversation about cost. Video does not have a per-asset price so much as a per-month commitment, and the businesses that get value from it are the ones that decided in advance what they could keep up.
How it runs
Repurposing designed at the shoot, not after it
Most repurposing is salvage: someone tries to cut vertical clips out of footage that was framed for a widescreen edit. Deciding the outputs before filming makes the same day produce several times the finished work.
Decide the outputs before anything is booked
One filming session is committed to a named set of deliverables — say one long-form piece, eight vertical cuts and a set of stills. That list changes the framing, the number of angles, how the audio is captured, and whether anyone wears something with a distracting pattern.
You get: A shot list mapped to named finished assets
Write for the first two seconds
Short-form is a discovery format. A stranger decides almost immediately whether to keep watching, and a slow logo animation guarantees that they do not. Every short cut opens on the thing that is interesting, and the branding arrives once someone has a reason to care.
You get: Openers written and reviewed before filming
Film in batches
Setting up costs more than filming does. One session covering several weeks of output is the difference between a plan that runs for a year and one that quietly stops. Batching also lets a nervous spokesperson warm up, which visibly improves everything after the first take.
You get: A month or more of source material per session
Cut long first, then short
The long-form edit forces the argument to be coherent. Once it holds together, the short cuts come out of it honestly rather than being assembled from offcuts. Working the other way round tends to produce short clips that are lively and a long piece that has nothing left in it.
You get: Long-form master plus the derived short cuts
Caption everything, properly
Auto-generated captions get names, products and technical terms wrong, and those are exactly the words that matter. Captions are corrected by a person, burned in where the platform needs it, and published as a transcript alongside the embed so the content exists in text as well as in video.
You get: Corrected captions and a published transcript per asset
Publish, then judge the two jobs separately
Discovery assets are judged on whether new people watched and stayed. Consideration assets are judged on whether someone already interested went on to enquire. Averaging them into one video report hides both answers.
You get: Reporting split by the job each asset was doing
What we handle
What sits inside a video engagement
Scope is set against your capacity number and against which formats you already have covered internally. Plenty of teams need planning and editing but want to film themselves, and that is a sensible arrangement.
- A format decision per message, including the ones we recommend not filming
- Capacity planning against the hours your team can genuinely commit
- Shot lists that name every finished asset a session has to produce
- Direction on camera for people who are not comfortable being filmed
- Vertical editing for feed placements, built to work with no sound
- Long-form editing for YouTube and for on-site consideration pages
- Human-corrected captions, plus a transcript published with every embed
- Thumbnails, titles and descriptions written rather than auto-filled
- Embedding that does not damage page speed on mobile connections
- Handover of raw footage and project files so you can re-edit without us
Next
Where video connects to the rest of the work
When you want reach faster
Questions
What people ask before committing to video
Do we need a studio, or can this be filmed on a phone?
Most of it can be filmed on a recent phone, provided the audio is captured on a separate microphone and the lighting is deliberate. Bad sound reads as amateur far faster than soft picture does.
A studio earns its cost for a small number of assets: a brand film, a product piece where finish is part of the argument, or anything a sales team will show in a room. Everything else is better shot often and cheaply than rarely and beautifully.
How many videos a month is realistic?
That depends entirely on how many hours your team can give to being filmed and approving cuts, which is why we ask for that number before proposing anything.
A common workable pattern is one half-day of filming per month producing one longer piece and six to ten short cuts. Teams that commit to weekly filming can do considerably more; teams that cannot commit to anything should not start with a plan that assumes they will.
Why do captions matter so much?
A large share of feed video is watched with the sound off, so a video that only works with audio loses most of its audience in the first second. Captions also make the content usable by people who are deaf or hard of hearing, which is a baseline accessibility expectation rather than an optional extra.
Accurate captions and a transcript also give the content a text form that search engines and AI systems can read, which an audio track alone does not.
When would you tell us not to make a video?
When the message has conditions, exceptions or numbers in it. Pricing structures, technical specifications and anything a buyer needs to re-read are worse on video than on a page, because video cannot be scanned.
Also when the video would exist only to say something already covered by a page that ranks. Re-recording your own content in a more expensive format is not a strategy.
Who owns the footage?
You do, including the raw material rather than only the finished cuts. Raw footage is what makes repurposing possible a year later, and agencies that keep it are keeping the ability to re-edit away from you.
We hand over project files and source media as part of every engagement, without asking.
Work out how much video you can genuinely sustain
Bring us the number of hours a month your team can be filmed and approve cuts. We will tell you what that supports, what it does not, and which of your planned videos should be written pages instead.
Related
Where to go next
- the content practice this belongs toVideo is one format inside a wider publishing plan.
- running a short-form account properlyWhere the discovery-format work actually gets published.
- keeping embedded video off your load timeA hero video is the most common cause of a slow page.
- the visual system that appears on screen
- growing awareness from a standing start
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal