Video Transcription
Great question about how you should think about the activation budget to do the things that marketing will require? In our scopes of work, we can only propose and price the services we directly provide, which are for fractional CMO services. As a management consulting firm, however, all of our clients do need activation and their budgets are as diverse as the clients that we serve.
A good rule of thumb for the businesses we work with, who of course, as I explained, are generally between five and 100 million in annual revenue. For those organizations. The fractional CMO role itself is usually a six figure budget and the marketing activation budget is usually a six or seven figure budget. Depending on the type of business where they’re at in their growth, their appetite and pace for growth, and their funds available.
It would be really premature for me to try to speculate about what the right marketing mix will be to power your organization based on the resources you have available. That, in fact, is the job of a fractional CMO, using of course our tools and their experience to help shape the correct strategy for your business, backed by the right execution layers. And that can take so many different shapes and sizes. As a matter of fact, I was thinking this morning, reading your email, about just one example in my own business. If I were to try to estimate for you how much does a two minute video cost to produce? It can absolutely be as wide ranging as almost nothing at all to $100,000.
Case in point, if you were to visit our client page and look at our testimonial videos, you’ll see that some of them done further down on the page are more professionally produced. At that time in our business, all of our clients were local, and I hired a video production team to do a series of videos for us with high quality production, but all regionally, all in one day. So for several thousand dollars, I was able to produce six videos.
Now imagine if all of those clients were scattered across the country or around the world, and we needed to hire multiple video teams or pay travel fees for a videography team. That could very easily be a very different budget. By contrast, during COVID while our clients were not meeting in person, we still needed to capture stories.
And so the more recent videos for videos on our site were done, captured via Zoom interview, and then produced through software we already had. So in some cases that was almost no cost if you factor out our staff time, the time to do the videos and produce them and get them cleaned up a bit. But they’re very low quality in terms of production, and that’s just one small example of why it would be impossible for me to speculate, what exactly should the mix be for your organization to meet your goals?
Through which types of content produced at what level distributed through which channels, through what kind of velocity, to which audiences? Hugely variable. So I hope it’s helpful to know that most of the clients we serve will carve out a six figure budget for our role to lead those efforts.
Another six figure budget to design the appropriate mix that will be tailored over time as we implement and learn and gather feedback from what works best. And your CMO, as a very entrepreneurial CMO, will help you place your bets, so to speak, about where to invest the resources you have. And that will mean, more often than not, saying no to many ideas in order to say yes to the few that we can do exceptionally well and track and we believe are going to be of highest impact.
