2021 has seen a huge boom in video content for businesses.
Many companies that weren’t embracing the trend a few years ago, began to generate content to keep communication channels open with their audience during the pandemic.
It’s been amazing to watch brands take control of their media, often producing quick, scrappy social media content in-house.
This has led many businesses to consider migrating their video production to an entirely in-house team. In the past, it was difficult to produce a video without expertise or great expense. Video equipment was extortionate, editing was time-consuming, and in general, production was seen as a specialty skill. Of course, the advent of smartphones with high-quality video cameras, Instagram, and online editing tools have slowly closed this gap.
But is this the best call?
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to take control of your brand narrative and experiment with video content at a low cost, but there are serious drawbacks to only producing in-house.
For one, this approach can actually cost you more money. Slick production skills can drive an employee's salary sky-high. Retaining a quality videographer (or videography team) on your payroll is a huge investment and their level of activity will vary wildly from month to month.
If you simply rely on your current marketing department to plan, shoot, edit and output your video content, you’re putting a huge strain on an overstretched team, which is likely to slow productivity across their workload.
Many teams who have taken on a small video production output have seen the unexpected burden of ‘on the fly’ production. This includes planning and scripting, editing, formatting for different resolutions, captioning for accessibility, publishing, and more.
It’s a lot of plates to keep spinning on top of your original responsibilities.
Outsourcing your video production to proven experts who offer efficient, scalable services on a per-project basis will streamline your workflow, give you access to the highest quality creatives, keeping your content fresh and aligned with your goals.
Outside of cost, there’s also the real need for an outsider's perspective.
A trained external team will bring industry insight, proven analytics to inform decisions, creative ideas, and a more reliable audience perspective to your ideas.
Videos that seemed self-explanatory to everybody in-house, may not have clarity for people outside of your office.
Only relying on an in-house team also seriously reduces your location options. You’re restricted to producing videos based on the geography of your office and your in-house team.
If you’re a global company, hoping to generate interest in wider territories, only ever delivering output from one area could alienate potential customers. At VidOps, we have a vast global network of creative freelancers, allowing us to remotely onboard a production team overseas, at the touch of a button.
One more risk you run is the possibility of low-quality video negatively impacting your brand awareness.
You can absolutely generate vast quantities of lower-quality video with an in-house team, but data shows this strategy can backfire hugely.
According to BrightCove: 62% of people will develop a negative impression of your brand from poor-quality video content. 23% will hesitate to purchase from that brand and 60% will be dissuaded from even engaging with that brand on social media.
As you can see, there’s plenty of reasons to hire an external production team, but ultimately, we find the best results come from supplementing internal with external.
It really doesn’t boil down to a case of either/or.
In-house can actually expand the impact of your external content. Four top-quality, externally produced videos can generate amazing results to showcase the brand at its best.
This in turn allows one in-house videographer to produce lower-quality, engagement-focused content for social media channels, with higher frequency.
This hybrid approach is increasingly popular.
Marketing Drive published survey findings that state: 57% of brands have established in-house creative teams with roles for video production, yet 95% of those organisations still use external support.
Ultimately, it’s important to consider the pros and cons of both types of production.
And remember that the most successful business models approach video production with flexibility and creativity, balancing in-house with external to achieve their best results