Hacking the Holidays: A Budget-Conscious Approach to Video Marketing

While the holiday season is a time of joy for many, it’s also a stressful time for marketing teams around the globe. The last few years, in particular, have caused even more challenging situations, including reduced budgets and increased content demands.

Gartner reported marketing budgets have hit “their lowest recorded level” at an average of just 6.4% for 2021 company revenue. This has left marketing teams stressed about the speed at which they’re expected to work and the amount of content they have to create with fewer resources. 

Now, marketers are increasingly looking for creative ways to do more with less. While it might seem difficult (or nearly impossible) at first, there are ways for your business to take a budget-conscious approach to holiday video marketing. Let’s explore how you can help your team stay within budget this (and every) holiday season. 

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Holiday Video Marketing on a Budget

Utilize User-Generated Content

With the rise of YouTube, TikTok, and other social media video platforms, UGC (or content that feels like UGC) has become a powerful tool. 

Now more than ever, consumers want to feel an intimate, personal connection with brands. These user-generated testimonials establish instant credibility and trust in your brand by instigating social proof. Popularized by a psychologist in the 1980s, social proof is when consumers see or hear about someone enjoying a product, or a professional recommending a service, and that testimonial encourages them to want it for themselves.

While UGC is, by definition, created by users, many brands are now leading the production process. So whether you use textbook UGC or produce UGC-like content, you can still convey authority to increase feelings of trust — all while making your videos more affordable than other concepts. 

UGC is a must-have if you’re trying to keep costs in check this holiday season. Instead of focusing on sets, travel, and other location-based expenses, you can focus solely on your talent and the message you want to promote.

Take Advantage of Post Production

While every step in the marketing video production process is essential, post-production might be the most critical. This step is usually a mixture of problem-solving and creativity, potentially involving editing, motion graphics, and sound effects (just to name a few). 

So why is this step so important? Post-production can allow you to repurpose content to work in several ways across different platforms, effectively giving you an entire campaign from one or two days of production. With this approach, you can use post-production to get more out of your already existing content. 

There’s so much content to create and several different channels to post to, so you want to make sure your content goes as far as possible. But, you can’t just share the same video across platforms and expect it to feel authentic. During post-production, you can edit your videos to make them feel native on different platforms by changing text, adding music, and ensuring other elements align with the specific platforms you want to use. 

Create a Streamlined, Yet Flexible Approach

Your ongoing video production process is the key to success during the holiday (or any other) season. If your winter strategy is built into the rest of your plan, you’ll be able to take a cohesive look at your approach and naturally flow into it as the season approaches. 

By planning as much as possible, you can refine and understand your strategy by taking a look at specific factors, including: 

• Budgets 
• Timelines
• Video styles
• Goals and KPIs 
• External resources

While this streamlined approach is critical, it also needs to be flexible. While we don’t know exactly what changes are ahead, we do know social and digital media changes are inevitable. And while it might sound counterintuitive, this is where structure and consistency can help us out the most. 

Through ongoing reviews and optimizations of your marketing strategy, your team can ensure everything is on track and focused on current goals. For example, if one of your KPIs needs shifting, your team will likely realize other elements need to shift as well. 

Marketing teams are continuously facing new challenges, which calls for an ongoing approach that’s structured enough to be stable throughout the year, but flexible enough to make these changes as they arise. 

Related: Social Media Video Ad Specs & Placements Guide

Connect With Your Audience All Year Long

While holiday video is successful in helping you reach your audience, truly effective video marketing strategies are in place all year long. But, this long-term strategy can seem daunting to many, especially people in small or medium-sized businesses without massive budgets or marketing departments. 

That’s where we come in! At QuickFrame, we believe businesses of all sizes should have the opportunity to create engaging content for video marketing all year long — so we created an end-to-end platform to connect brands like yours with the world’s best video makers who are ready to create content that helps you reach your audience, meet your goals, and grow your business. 

Ready to get started? Contact us today!