Should You Build or Hire a Video Production Team? Things To Consider and Other Fun Facts.
When incorporation video into your own your client’s marketing strategy the question arises: “Should I make or hire a video team?”
There is no clear-cut answer; so rather than me telling you which one is better, how about I give you the information so you can choose for yourself?
We will analyze three scenarios: Building A Video Team, Hiring A Video Team, and doing a mixture of both.
Building A Video Production Team:
When building a video team, you can do two things: Train existing employees (or yourself) to learn video or hire a competent videographer that can build the department for you.
Advantages of Building a Video Production Team:
-Full creative control of all projects
-Fast turn arounds and easier logistics
-Much cheaper in the long run if you do lots of videos
-Is a profitable skill that you can resell to clients
-Huge value added to the company if it works properly
Disadvantages of Building a Video Production Team:
-Most people can quickly learn how to make “ok” videos for social media; but learning professional videography is a full-time job that takes years to master. So, if you are teaching an existing client how to do this it will take a couple months to be half way decent, and if you are hiring a skilled professional, they will run you between $30,000 to upwards of $80,000 per year.
-Quality productions require quality equipment. Between cameras, lenses, editing systems, lights and stabilizers could between $10,000 and $50,000 for a video production system.
Things To Consider When Building a Video Team:
-Hiring a Superstar might not be enough
Hiring an experience videographer can get you a long way in terms of video quality. Company highlights reels, testimonials, client experience, podcasts, and in-house commercials are all things they should be able to do. However, for more advanced high budget productions (like this one) you will still need to hire an outside videography company (even if it’s to supplement your main cinematographer). This is because big video projects are multi-crew productions. You might need a cinematographer, a lighting technician (gaffer), and audio expert, talent, location scouting and many other things that one single person won’t be able to handle.
No matter how talent a videographer is, they won’t be able to accomplish what an entire production company can achieve.
-Prove the Concept First
If you’ve never tried video marketing before, you should not build an in-house video production team. That time and expense can be saved by hiring a freelancer to “test the waters” and find out the best way for your company to market with video.
Hiring A Video Production Team:
Most companies take this route as they can’t justify the expense and time of building a competent in-house team.
Make sure to check out our article on the 8 COSTLY Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring a Video Production Company.
Advantages of Hiring a Production Team:
-Proven experience/portfolio
-They bring all the required equipment
- “One Stop Shop” for all video production needs
- Cheaper than an in-house team if you only do a coupe videos per year
Disadvantages of Hiring a Video Production Team:
-More expensive on a per project basis
-Less control over the production (however this can be a good thing if you are not experienced in this field).
-Limited availability (as they will likely have other projects competing for their attention)
Things To Consider When Hiring a Video Production Team
Once again refer to our previous article 8 COSTLY Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring a Video Production Company for a complete list!
Building & Hiring A Video Production Team; A Hybrid Approach:
You can actually do both! Here how it would work:
Let’s say your company does a weekly sales update or podcast; these simpler videos can be recorded with less than $3,000 worth of equipment and a couple hours’ worth of production training (the Joe Rogan Podcast is a good example). This part could be done in-house by simply training an existing employee in the marketing department which saves you the need to hire a new one (something we will cover in a later article).
So, with the weekly in-house content taken care of, you can now hire a video production team for the high-end commercials, highlight event done a couple times a year, or large marketing campaigns.
Hope you this provided some insight into the factors to consider when either building or hiring a video production team. If you have any question, feel free to reach out at business@carloscortesi.com and I’ll see you on the next article. Peace!