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Video marketing for leasing services - costs, steps, pros and cons

Tim Cumming and Helen Pain, updated 11 Jan 2022

Let's say you're a leasing services company specialising in vehicles and industrial machinery. You're considering business video and you may be wondering what's at risk. The pros and cons. The strategy. The costs, and the process. And as the 2020 Gartner report on the new B2B buying journey clearly suggests, the traditional B2B buyer journey has gone; marketing has absorbed some of the role of sales. So today's video investment has to be more shrewd.

Video marketing humanises your firm

This article aims to set out clearly what's involved.

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1. Strategy

A great starting point is the audience you're trying to address. Is it the lender, the businesses, or consumers?

For some time in the UK, there has been too much dry powder, and most leasing services companies are facing a challenge around uncertainty in the economy, the impact of regulation and environmental issues. It's here, in the short-term, that your business video might be best focused, while in the long-term, lenders will always be an important audience.

So, strategically, which audience comes first? Will we just address one audience, or should we do both at the same time? This decision needs to inform everything you do in your video marketing.

Perhaps the most appealing approach might be to pick one; to prioritise the production of business and consumer facing video, and demote or defer the lender videos. However, as both audiences can explore both of your propositions - all of your promises - it might be wise to do both at the same time, to furnish both audiences with a comprehensive picture of your ability to connect one end of the spectrum with the other.

Do List

  • Lenders: show that you're constantly looking for new developments and opportunities in acquisition development
  • Businesses and consumers: show that you're constantly communicating with, and understanding, the lender perspective
  • Flip occassionally: these messages work for both audiences, why not flip them now and again for variety and reassurance?
  • Buyer enablement: Make sure your site and videos are optimised to buyer needs - check out the wonderful Gartner's report on buyer enablement. You'll need to reveal prices, packages and outcomes with models to assist the buyer - while explaining and reassuring with video

These are strong messages and are worthy of your attention from the get go.

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2. Costs

Videos can cost between £1k and £10k per minute, depending on the quality and usefulness of the videos made. And you'll always get a lower unit price if you buy more because the economies of scale are considerable in video production and editing.

It's easy to save money by going to the lower end of the budget scale, and if you have a strong in-house digital team, with a solid grip of strategy, that's fine. You'll be able to brief well and control the deliveries well, so you get exactly what's needed. But if not, you'll be cutting out some essentials. The video firm's awareness of audience traits, your commercial imperative, CTA's and how they shape the story, and, quite possibly, awareness of the role of the video itself. This is a frequently overlooked implication, when selecting low cost video. The consquence is the risk of lower connection, lower engagement, lower return.

At the upper end of the scale, production values and audience understanding will be very high - this gives your marketing and your video production considerable power. Of course, it comes at a higher price. Generally speaking, you'll get what you pay for. Perhaps the most 'we try harder' segment of the video marketplace is the middle to upper end, where more experienced firms lie, who are striving to compete with the bigger firms. In our experience, here is where the value is highest - with ideas as strong as the top end, but with better effort and price. If value is what floats your boats. And if not - if it's quality is more important than cost, then the top end of the market is where to go.

Efficacy should be your watchword when commissioning video marketing, because the point is not to look nice. It's to (A) put a strong proposition which (B) resonates with the ideal audience, (C) into the 'action' part of their minds, (D) wherever they are on the internet. Which makes you:

These are not small things. And, when the size of your investment is so big, it is truly worth building these in from the get-go.

The costs that you should allow for are not just video production, but also deployment of the video, which includes:

You should also budget for placement: a campaign to get your videos seen by those that need to see them. If you're a big networking company operating with a large list of contacts, and you've been doing it for decades, and you don't believe there are any new contacts to be added because you're at 100% saturation of your market, placement is very much an internal activity, run by email.

If, on the other hand, you're looking to reach the hearts and minds of, say, UK companies, or new managers of these companies who might have taken up their roles since you bought or developed your contact list, social media or prospecting are going to be the channels most suited towards reaching them.

The same goes for lenders. If you're constantly looking for new lenders, whether they be banks or TFIs, you will still need to be using social media for prospecting or for inbound marketing.

Do List

  • Efficacy: The points listed above, when enacted all at the same time, will achieve response from your audience, greater education, desire, and actual reaction in the form of enquiry, selection or preference
  • Budget: Allowing a budget for deployment and placement work will be important. Many firms believe that the principle budget should be spent on production, and much less should go on deployment and placement. In our experience, the reality is that the budget should be a little less than evenly split, perhaps 60/40 with a slight bias towards production. But circumstances vary, as do your needs.
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3. Steps

The process of video production and marketing is rational, and each step is essential to a positive outcome:

A) Planning

This stage includes:

B) The CTA (Call-To-Action)

Let's compare two lender scenarios:

Swapping the CTA in either of these circumstances would, of course, be inappropriate. So, setting the CTA to match the moment in the buying cycle is very important. This is where your should start their planning work first.

Understanding the value of these CTAs is also critical because it will help you to measure the success of business video. If it takes you, let's say, ten Zoom meetings to convert one lender, and an average lender provides a million pounds, you know the value of a Zoom is £100,000. But if you convert one in 200 visits to your website, you know that a CTA of 'visit our website' is worth £500.

C) Production

Your video firm will develop the videos set out in the planning stage, and ideally, the best way is to film everything all at once and edit everything all at once. These produce high economies of scale, and will deliver value for you.

D) Deployment

It's important to deploy your videos in a way which best suit users, search engines and social media. Users prefer:

It's also important to keep the duration down, and maximise authenticity and value. The duration should be shown and, ideally, the thumbnail for the video should depict either an authentic-looking picture of the asset being leased, or an individual from your firm talking.

E) Placement

It's wise to allow two months for placement work to really start to take effect - placement is very much a long term game, similar to search engine optimisation, although, with paid placement work, you can reach audiences very quickly, but your budget will need to be higher, and you can spend anywhere between £500 and £10,000 for paid placement per month, per video. Budgeting wisely, and considering the speed at which you need to operate, would affect your budget here.

F) Analytics

If you set your CTAs up correctly at the beginning of the project, this step will be a breeze as you'll be constantly monitoring, using, for example, Google Analytics and Google Goals, the value of the response and traffic that you're getting as a result of your video marketing.

Do List

  • Theme and voice: consider your company message and an appropriate CTA for your video
  • Reach audiences: deploy, place and analyse your videos in a way which best suit users, search engines and social media.
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4. Pros of Video Marketing for asset-based leasing services companies

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5. Cons of Video Marketing for asset-based leasing services companies

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Already got this covered?

If you already have marketing videos and they're not generating response, there's much above that will help you improve their performance. But what would be even better than your current marketing videos?

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