If you’re a financial advisor thinking about video marketing, there’s a good chance one of your first questions is, “How much is this going to cost?”
That sounds like the right question.
It probably isn’t.
You can spend almost nothing (but your time) creating videos yourself. You can spend a few thousand dollars on professionally produced content. Or you can invest tens of thousands of dollars a year in an ongoing video marketing program.
So how do you know what’s right for your business?
Start by asking a different question:
What do I need video to do?
Because creating one polished About Us video is a very different marketing investment than building a consistent LinkedIn presence, growing a YouTube channel, or using video to generate and nurture prospects.
Video Marketing Costs Depend on the Job
There is no magic number every financial advisor should spend on video.
The right budget depends on the job you’re asking video to do.
If you need an About Us video for your website, you’re primarily looking at a production project. You may need one or two polished videos that introduce your team, explain your approach or process, and help prospective clients get to know you.
Here’s an example of advisor Dan Johnson’s story behind Birchcreek Wealth Management:
If you want to post on LinkedIn every week, you have a different challenge. Now you need a sustainable system for developing topics, writing scripts, recording, editing and publishing consistently.
And if your goal is to use video as a growth channel, production is only one piece of the equation. You also need to think about strategy, distribution, promotion and measurement.
The more you expect video to accomplish, the more your budget needs to account for what happens before and after the camera turns on.
Four Ways Financial Advisors Can Invest in Video
Your options generally fall into four levels:
1.DIY video: You handle the equipment, recording, editing and posting. The financial cost can be low, but your time becomes a significant part of the investment and often the quality and how people perceive your brand suffers too. Check out this video about whether selfie-style will hurt your brand.
2. Freelancer or project-based production: You bring in outside help for specific videos, filming or editing. This can work well when you have a defined project and already know what you want to create.
3. Professional video partner: You have an ongoing resource for developing, producing and managing repeatable video content.
4.Full video marketing program: Video becomes part of your broader marketing strategy, with support for strategy, content creation, promotion and measurement.
None of these approaches is automatically better.
The right choice depends on your goals, resources and ability to consistently get the content in front of the right audience. And if you’re hoping to save time with any of these options, here are 4 tips we share with our clients to help your shoot go quicker!
What Are You Actually Paying For?
When comparing financial advisor video marketing costs, don’t just compare the price on the proposal.
Compare what is included.
Are you paying for:
- Strategy?
- Scripting?
- Production?
- Editing?
- Compliance support?
- Distribution?
- Promotion?
- Measurement?
A $5,000 video proposal and a $5,000 video marketing program can sound similar, but they may deliver very different things.
One might give you a finished video.
The other might give you a repeatable system for creating and using video.
Your Time Is Part of the Budget
There’s another cost advisors often overlook: your own time.
Imagine one video takes two hours to develop ideas, three hours to write and revise the script, two hours to record, and another three hours to edit, post and troubleshoot.
That’s 10 hours.
The cash cost may look low, but what is an hour of your time worth? Let’s say you put a $500/hr price tag on your time. That 100-hour video just cost you $5,000.
More importantly, is editing and posting video really the highest-value use of your time?
DIY video can be a great way to get started. But if the process keeps you from doing higher-value client or business-development work, the cheapest production option may not actually be the most economical one.
>>>If you’re willing to MacGyver your way through video, check out this webinar-on-demand packed with DIY tips.
Production Is Only Half the Equation
One of the biggest mistakes financial advisors can make is putting the entire video budget into production.
You can spend $10,000 creating beautiful videos and then spend nothing getting them seen.
That’s a production budget, not necessarily a video marketing strategy.
Think about video in three stages:
Create → Promote → Track
Where will the content live? Your website? LinkedIn? Email? YouTube?
How will people discover it?
And how will you know whether it is helping your business?
A video with 10,000 views isn’t automatically more valuable than one with 500 views. If those 500 viewers are the right prospects and the content helps move them closer to a conversation, the smaller audience can be far more valuable.
Are You Spending Too Little?
You may be underinvesting if your video strategy constantly falls off the calendar, you’re spending hours on work outside your expertise, the quality undermines your credibility, or you’re creating content without consistently promoting it.
The answer isn’t always to spend more.
Sometimes, you just need a better process. And process is our middle name. If you’re looking to level up your video marketing strategy, our Idea Kit remote video process might fill the bill.
Are You Spending Too Much?
You may be overspending if your production value is far beyond what your audience needs, you’re creating more content than you can distribute, or you’re paying for production features that don’t make the message more effective.
A $15,000 video isn’t automatically better marketing than a $1,500 video.
The right video is the one that accomplishes the job you hired it to do.
So, How Much Should You Spend?
Before setting your financial advisor video marketing budget, answer six questions:
- What business outcome am I trying to influence?
- Who needs to see my videos?
- How frequently do I realistically need new content?
- What can my team handle internally?
- How will we get the videos seen?
- How will we measure whether they’re working?
Then set your budget.
You may discover that DIY video is exactly what you need right now. You may decide a freelancer makes sense for a handful of projects. Or you may find that an ongoing video marketing program gives you the consistency and expertise you need.
The important thing is to build your budget around what you need video to accomplish, not what someone else is spending.
At Idea Decanter, we’ve spent years helping financial advisors turn video from a one-off production project into a repeatable marketing tool. The goal isn’t simply to make better-looking videos. It’s to help advisors use video strategically to build trust, reach the right audience and support business growth.
You can find out more about Idea Decanter’s video packages and pricing here:
If you’re trying to figure out what level of video investment makes sense for your firm, start with the job you need video to do. The budget will follow.
