Jeff HiltyDifferentiating your brand in a competitive digital world can be a challenge. One way to get ahead in the race for attention is leveraging great explainer videos that grab your prospect’s attention and convey your message in a fun and easy-to-understand way..
But where to start, and how much does it cost? To answer those questions, we’ve put together this guide where we cover some of the benefits of explainer videos, and the costs associated with making them.
Related reading: The Best Explainer Videos: Key Traits, Benefits, and Examples
How Much Does Explainer Video Production Cost?
“So, what’s the price?” is a common question, but as always, there’s no one simple answer. Explainer video pricing depends on a number of things, and here, we’ll have a closer look at some of them. We’ll also have a look at the business case for explainer video production and the benefits of explainer videos. Because as any marketer knows, the price is not what matters most – in the end, it’s the ROI that determines if explainer video production is worth your time and money.
Related reading: The Real Value Of Investing In Video Marketing
The Benefits of Explainer Videos
It’s no wonder explainer videos have grown so popular in marketing, as they have many benefits. Before diving into the pricing aspect, let’s have a look at some of the ways explainer videos can bring value to your business and improve your overall marketing and communication:
Make The Complicated Easy To Understand
One of the main advantages of explainer videos is that they can help you explain complex products and concepts in a way that makes them easier to grasp. People learn and process information much better from video than from text, and an explainer video will help you bring a new level of clarity to your messaging. Clear messaging is essential when trying to stand out in a competitive marketplace, and explainer videos are an invaluable tool for achieving that.
Show, don’t sell
Explainer videos are great for illustrating and explaining how your product brings value without having to resort to hard sales pitches. With an explainer video, you get to educate and entertain your prospects in a way that captures their interest and builds trust. When you allow your audience to truly understand your product without feeling like they’re being sold to, the chances of them becoming customers are much higher. This is why explainer videos are such a powerful selling tool.
Grab Your Audience’s Attention
When it comes to different content formats, video is one of the most efficient in grabbing and retaining attention. Videos are engaging, captivating, and easy to consume and digest. People are also more likely to watch a video all the way through than to read a text from the beginning to the end. This makes explainer videos a reliable vehicle for delivering your message.
Improve Your Marketing and Sales Funnel
Explainer videos are useful and valuable at all stages of your marketing and sales funnel. Whether it’s in a LinkedIn ad, in that first outreach email, or at the bottom of the funnel explaining your product features, explainer videos do a great job at conveying the right information in a fun and attractive way. Good explainer videos can help you shorten your sales cycles and increase your sales velocity significantly.
Increase Web Traffic
Video content is great for SEO and improves your search rankings. Including explainer videos at strategic places on your website will help you boost traffic. Since videos, in general, are so engaging, they tend to make visitors stay longer on your website so that they can watch the entire video. This is something Google loves, and it makes the Google algorithm recognize your content as valuable and relevant.
What Goes Into Explainer Video Pricing?
Design
The design is often a big chunk of the project for animated explainer videos, but how much the design costs depends on several factors. While some brands already come with an almost finished concept and a very detailed brand style guide, others leave design more open for the video production agency to decide.
There are also different ways of producing animated explainer videos. A thumb rule is that the more customized something is for your brand, the more it will cost. For example, there are many explainer video producers out there with extremely low-cost offers, but many are essentially using premade templates and just altering things like colours and fonts.
Scripting
Scripting is another essential part of your explainer video production project. Actually, it’s the most critical part of them all. Without a good script, it doesn’t matter how much resources go into the other aspects of the production; it will fall flat anyway. The script is the foundation of your video, and crafting a good video script takes time and skills.
A common mistake is to create a script in-house and then expect the video production agency to execute it based on that. But while your script may be a great point of departure, it’s essential to recognize that writing video scripts is a skill set vastly different from copywriting in general. Usually, it’s best to let the agency have a say and propose a script based on their experience of what works in this particular format.
Creative Development
The creative concept is what sets really great explainer videos apart from the mediocre and less-than-good ones. Creative development is a part of the production process, and it’s often where agencies offering extremely low prices are not investing enough time and effort.
A good creative video brief will help your agency in this process. The brief is a summary describing what type of video you want to create and what your objectives are. It’s there to outline your goals, budget, messaging, branding, audience, and other important information when planning your explainer video production.
Related reading: How To Write a Winning Creative Brief For Video Production
Animation
Animation is an art form, and you get what you pay for. As we mentioned earlier, some low-cost agencies work with generic templates and apps to produce high quantities of animated videos at high-speed and low prices. These videos, however, will at best, fail to make your brand stand out from the competition. And at worst, they can even damage your brand by failing to build that trust that we all know is the most critical and powerful conversion driver there is.
Voice-over
Another cost that goes into explainer video production is the voice-over artist. Like all creative professionals, voice-over artists come at different prices, and it’s not always the most expensive ones that best fit your brand. Instead, finding the voice that best conveys your message and brand vibe is important. However, saving too much on this line item is not good. Getting a proper recording that gives the required sound quality is essential to the entire production.
Sound Design and Music
Another cost that’s easy to forget is the background sounds and music. Also, you need to ensure you get the correct rights that allow you to distribute your video in the way you’ve planned, for example, to use it in advertising and for other commercial purposes.
Why Do Bids From Different Video Production Agencies Vary So Much?
While most explainer videos contain more or less the same elements, pricings still vary a lot between different production agencies. There are many different reasons for this, and explainer videos also come at very varying levels of quality.
Factors That Affect The Cost Of Your Explainer Video Production
The better you understand the explainer video production process, the easier it becomes to pick the right agency for your project. Let’s have a look at some of the factors that impact explainer video pricing.
How much preparation is required?
Preparation is an integral part of video production, and it’s included in the price. The more research and preparation a project will require, the more pre-production days will be necessary and the more it will cost.
What level of skills and experience will be needed?
The complexity of your explainer video project will affect the price. If the project required more experienced and technically proficient people, it will cost more money.
What is the scope of your explainer video project?
Will it be a short and quick production or a more elaborate and time-consuming process? Will the project entail one video or a whole series of videos? What level of creativity is required from the agency?. A more expensive bid could be factoring in spending more time on the creative ideation and on making magic happen.
The size of the crew
The crew size will affect the budget and depends on your project. With many explainer video projects, you can get away with a lean production team, but other productions will require more staffing, which will mean a higher cost.
Related reading: Corporate Video Production: Strategies, Costs, and Things to Look For
Other questions you can ask the video production agency include:
- What does the pricing model look like? Do they charge per hour, charge a day rate, or give you a flat rate for the entire project? Has the agency created content for your type of target audience before? There is a difference between videos for TikTok advertising FMCG-type products and B2B videos where every sale is worth thousands or even hundreds of dollars.
- Does the agency have all skills and competencies in-house? Can they produce the types of videos you need? Will they take responsibility for the whole video production and post-production?
Related reading: Why Bids From Video Production Companies Vary So Much
Creativity Is The Key To Getting More Bang For Your Buck
In the end, your budget will not decide the level of success your explainer video will have. You can spend tons of money and create something extraordinarily well-produced, but if the idea behind the video isn’t strong enough, nobody will care.
So if your budget is limited, don’t despair. Instead, consider your budget as a frame. Because, as all artists know, the frame is actually great for creativity. It helps you focus on what’s important and eliminate the rest. So, in other words, it’s not your budget but rather the creative concept of your explainer video that will determine its performance.
This is why teaming up with an innovative video production agency and letting them get creative and make something that stands out is the best way to get some serious bang for your bucks. One truly great idea and creative execution can completely transform your business.
Related reading: Invest In Creative To Optimize Your Video Production Budget
Partner With An Award-Winning Video Production Agency
Covalent is a Pittsburgh-based creative video production company catering to B2B, B2C, and D2C companies of all sizes and in various industries.
We’re known for producing some of the best explainer videos on the market. We can help you create everything from TV commercials and brand videos to explainer videos and docu-style shoots. We produce videos at different prices, always focusing on helping you reach your business goals. Combining years of experience with cutting-edge creativity, our productions have received numerous awards and accolades.
Get in touch and explore how we can help you get started with explainer video production and a more exciting and engaging corporate communication!