How Much SHOULD You Spend On Video Production?

We've all seen articles on "How Much DOES Video Production Cost" (ours is here), but really, the more important question is how much SHOULD you spend? And why?

Let me reframe the question entirely. The real question isn't 'how much should I spend on a video?' It's 'how much should I spend on solving my problem?' — and the answer might not even be a video. It could be a suite of twenty videos, or something else entirely.

Before you come to an agency with a number plucked from thin air — because it's what you have lying around, or what feels about right, or what someone told you was normal — take a step back. Because if you skip the thinking that comes before the budget conversation, you'll almost certainly spend either too much or too little. And both are expensive mistakes.

Three Questions Before You Think About Money

In that order. No skipping ahead.

1. What is the actual problem you are trying to solve?

2. What tangible outcome would make you feel like you have genuinely solved it?

3. What is that outcome worth to you in real terms?

That third question is the one most people skip. It's also the most important. Because once you know what solving your problem is actually worth to you, the question of what to spend on solving it stops being a guess and starts being a calculation.

The Barber and the Estate Agent

Two hypothetical clients. Both call us up. Both say roughly the same thing: 'We'd like a video, about one to two minutes, for social media and the website — what would that roughly cost?'

Client one is a barber. He wants to attract ten more customers a week. At an average spend of £20 per visit, that's £200 a week, £800 a month, £9,600 a year. If he uses the video for two years, the value of successfully solving his problem is around £19,000.

Client two is a high-end estate agent. Her marker of success is one additional sale per month. Average commission: £10,000. That is £120,000 a year. Over two years, the value of solving her problem is £240,000.

In their own heads, they've both decided they want the same thing. A video. And they could well have both read the same article on how much video production costs and determined they should expect to pay the same. Which can leave one of them afraid that it's going to cost way more than they can afford, and the other believiung they can get away with spending pittance. But in actuality they're both chasing completely different outcomes.

For the barber, spending £15,000 on a production makes no sense. That is essentially betting the entire value of the outcome on a single marketing asset — before you have seen a return. Equally, for the estate agent, spending £2,000 on her problem is frankly absurd. A casino that could turn £2,000 into £720,000 would have a queue around the block — and go bust very quickly. The maths does not hold in either direction.

So What's a Sensible Number?

Now obviously it is not my place to tell you how to allocate your budget. But that being said, if you've worked out what successfully solving your problem is worth, and are serious about solving it with marketing, investing 10–20% of that figure in the solution is a reasonable starting point.

For the barber, that's £1,900–£3,800 over the two-year horizon. A simple stylish homepage banner video and/or a series of quick-fire social videos for £2 - 4k that brings in ten extra customers a week? His business mates down the pub are not going to laugh at him when he tells them what he spent. For the estate agent, 10–20% of £240,000 is £24,000–£48,000. At the lower end of that, a serious, well-produced campaign that generates one extra sale per month? Her accountant is not going to have a heart attack — they are going to ask why she did not do it sooner.

Now, for either of these guys, those numbers might feel enormous, until you run them against the outcome. That is exactly the point. Context changes everything.

"A Video" Is Not a Thing

Here's the other issue buried in both of those phone calls. When someone says 'I want a video,' they've already made an assumption — that the solution is known and the only remaining question is price.

But a video is not a commodity. You can't tot up the hours, add the fuel costs, tack on 20% and call it a day. Video takes a hundred different forms, serves a hundred different purposes, and the value of any given piece of work has almost nothing to do with the time it took to make.

The designer who came up with the Nike tick may have sketched it in half an hour. Did they charge half an hour's pro-rata fee? Of course not. Because the value of what they created is not a function of the time they spent — it's a function of what it went on to do in the world. Asking 'how much is a video?' is like asking 'how much is a building?' It depends what you're trying to build, why you're building it, where you're building it, what it's built out of, how quickly you need it built, and what it needs to do when it's finished.

What If I Simply Don't Have That Budget?

This is the honest part. And it comes up constantly. Say you're that estate agent and you genuinely don't have £30,000 available right now. That's fine — we totally understand that people often don't have large budgets sitting idle.

But the worst thing you can do is take the £2,000 you do have, spend it on something generic that has no hope of achieving your actual goal, and then conclude that video doesn't work when it fails to solve your £250,000 problem.

The better option — and a good agency will tell you this — is to be straight about what you have. Tell us the budget. A decent agency won't just say it's not enough (within reason). They'll tell you what it is enough for. Narrow the ambition to match the investment. Instead of trying to win one new sale a month, maybe the goal becomes building enough credibility online that you stop losing pitches you should be winning. That is a smaller, more targeted objective — and £2,000 spent on achieving it properly, with a clear purpose and the right execution, will outperform £2,000 spent on a vague attempt at everything.

The difference between a cheap video that works and one that does not is almost always whether it had a specific, achievable purpose. Budget is not the enemy. Vagueness is.

The Short Version

You wouldn't spend £20 on a house and you wouldn't spend £1.2 million on a haircut. The right spend isn't about what video costs in the abstract — it's about what your problem is worth to solve, and what a sensible proportion of that looks like as an investment.

Work out the value of the outcome. Start from there. Then find an agency you trust to help you spend that money in the way most likely to get you there. That's the only calculation that actually matters.

Not sure what your problem is worth — or what budget makes sense? That's a conversation we're happy to have. No pressure, no pitch — just a straight answer.

Let's talk about your project