4 Pricing Strategies for Videography | How Much to Charge for Videography

what's going on guys my name is Ryan snod it rhymes thaad and welcome to another video this week we're covering the for pricing strategies that you can use as a videographer to price your services this one came by popular request from my Facebook group so if you're not a part of it make sure to go join it it's the freelance videographer community on Facebook it's a free group that you can join to gain access to a bunch of videographers all over the world and ask business-related questions on how you can grow your solo freelance business so if you're interested in that make sure to go check that out and we're gonna get into the video right now in this video I'm going to be covering four main pricing strategies which are hourly rate a day rate a value and then a retainer so all four of these have different positions within the framework of your business if you're just starting out you're probably going to be more in the hourly or the day rate type of area if you're more intermediating or more experienced you're probably going to be looking more at the value pricing or the retainer side so we'll cover all the pros and cons of each of these so you can decide which one's best for your business first up is the hourly rate when you're first starting out as a videographer hourly rate is the most common option that a lot of people choose so a big benefit of doing hourly rate is that you can estimate things a lot faster so if you know it takes you two days to shoot a video and probably a week to edit it you can just add the hours up and boom you have an estimate that's probably one of the main benefits there's a lot of cons with writing an hourly rate pricing structure though number one being that you're capping the amount of money that you can make in a month and in a year there are only so many hours in a week that you can shoot and edit and if you just fill up your calendar you've effectively capped the amount of money that you made and videographers like us don't get into this field just so we can work an hourly rate because we might as well just go work for somebody else or for a studio or for an agency and just do that as a full-time job the whole purpose of starting your own business is that you can have exponentially more income and really grow wealth for yourself so this is something that's really a downside to that another downside of having an hourly rate is because all hours are not created equal it can be really hard to shoot a project that takes you know just one day but that one day is super grueling and there's just a lot of stress that comes with that one day compared to something that could take an entire week that's mediocre effort and it's just not really an even playing around when it comes to understanding what your hours are worth the other downside is that it devalues what you do this is where you attract a lot of those price shoppers with the hourly rate because people get in the mode of what's the cheapest I can get the service done and they start comparing you directly with the other competition that they're vetting obviously I am NOT a fan of the hourly rate rate structure but it is a good place to start when you're first starting now in your business then you're gonna probably move into the next step which is more of a day rate so in terms of the film industry day rates and half-day rates are very very common and if you're subcontracting for another studio or another you know shooter or something like that a lot of them just want a day rate the only time I really give a day rate is if somebody needs me to just shoot say b-roll for another video project or just be a grip or just be a lighting person or what-have-you day rates are really good if you're subcontracting but I don't recommend them for clients what if it's a video for a super large client for a Superbowl commercial or somebody that's just running you know ads with a facebook campaign or a nonprofit that has no budget as you can see all these different clients have different needs and your time in that time period to go shoot for them for eight to ten hours could be very different in terms of the value so a benefit of having a day rate again similar to the hourly is that it's easy to estimate if someone says hey what would it cost you to shoot a two-day shoot and have three days of edit you can just quickly estimate that out right away and a lot of people just have a minimum amount of engagement so if the client doesn't have say a thousand dollars to spend on a video they won't even mess with them just because it's not worth their time so again day rates are step up above hourly rates just because you can kind of fill your calendar but you've really effectively capped how much money you can make which again is not why a lot of us get into this business so that leads me to the third option which is value-based pricing or project-based pricing which is what I recommend most people do so what value-based pricing does is it prices the project based on the value to the client to get to value-based pricing you have to ask some really serious and business focused questions to your client I typically run a questionnaire by all my clients that are businesses just so I can better understand what their needs are and what some of the outcomes of the video will produce for them this is really good for you to understand the ROI of a video or the return on investment so when a company is looking to create some kind of marketing collateral they're gonna put X amount of dollars into this production what they're hoping to get is on the other end which is the ROI so really what I like to ask my clients if they have these numbers available is what they predict the ROI of the will be based on their previous marketing efforts as if I can find out that this video will likely produce say $100,000 of revenue for a company and they need what I can do to get them that money you have a lot more leverage than you think when you're in this situation because they need the creative done they need it done well and if it's done well they will hit that's figure which is their goal for the entire campaign so knowing this it's easier for you to position yourself as an expert or a video marketer and say hey wouldn't it make sense if you invested 20% of that amount that you're hoping to get just to get this thing off the ground or fifteen percent or ten percent or whatever it is now you're not even talking about days that's going to take you to produce because it really doesn't matter how long it'll take you to do they don't care about how much time and effort you're gonna put into it they just want the result and the results not even the video it's the ROI or the return on investment that they're gonna get whatever the nisha is whatever the goal is you have to know what the value in terms of dollars is in terms of what that goal is for that client it's really hard for beginners that you grasp this concept because they're used to just trading time for money and once you understand that you're not in the trading time for money business you're trading solutions for the problems that these people have so when they approach you they're not coming to you for a video they're coming to you for a solution for this problem so that's why I love value-based pricing that's the pricing model that I follow for most of my projects and it's helped me exponentially make more money and I've heard a lot of people in certain situations that price it out based on a day rate or an hourly rate and they lose the project because they price themselves so low everybody else is coming in with value-based pricing where it's 20 30 40 thousand dollars for a video and then you come in at like three thousand because it's only going to take you 30 hours and $100 is your rate and that's what it is you've effectively priced yourself out of that project and it's really hard for people to grasp that especially if they've never worked with a business but they think of it in terms of how much budget they have allocated and what that investments going to get them after they produce a video with you I really love value pricing it does take some effort and some knowledge in terms of the business side of things which is what we're trying to do here with the YouTube channel I want to try and educate you guys as much as I can so I can give you some ammo going into these meetings so you don't effectively price yourself out of a project or undercut your prices so much that you're losing a ton of money and leaving it on the table so the last pricing option that we're going to cover today is retainer pricing now retainers are not just going to pop up out of nowhere you're not going to go solicit a business and say hey can I get you on retainer to do a bunch of video work it's gonna take more of a relationship building process with that client so usually a client will work with you for say a couple months straight and they have three or four videos through every month and that's when you can kind of approach them about doing it retainer so what what a retainer is is that the client would pay you X amount of dollars per month and then you would trade either for a certain amount of deliverables for them or you have a certain amount of hours that you've allotted throughout the month to allocate to their business I recommend just doing deliverables because again we don't want to price ourselves based on the hourly rates we want to give them the outcome they want which in this case would be consistent content so you would sign an agreement that says usually for six months or for a year we agree that they're gonna pay X amount of dollars and I'm going to give them two videos a month say it could be a video a week a video a month photo video mixture whatever it is that they need you can kind of make this into the retainer retainers are amazing for folks like us because you can basically have guaranteed income every single month it's really great if you're trying to scale your business because once you get say three or four retainers if they're all paying say a thousand dollars a month you know that you're getting three to four thousand dollars a month guaranteed so you can start buying gear based on that you can start hiring out editors for that you could start booking other projects or take a vacation there's just so much more flexibility that you have with a retainer and really kind of that mastery of businesses when you have a couple retainers in place and then you fill the gaps when you're not shooting for that retainer with other projects based on value and that's really when you're gonna see a huge growth in your business is when you have you know say three or four retainers that are on for two to five thousand dollars a month or up and you've got you know good cash flow of about 10 grand per month coming in your business that's a six-figure income right there you go take a vacation between those and not have to worry or you can really hustle hard and fill the gaps with those value based videos in between for say five ten fifteen thousand dollars in between and you're well on your way to making half a million a million dollars a year in revenue for your business if you want to learn more about pricing sales marketing and how to grow your videography business I've created a course to help you do just that it's called solo video Pro the course contains over 40 lessons on everything from how to start your business creating an LLC figuring out your website to sales marketing strategies for LinkedIn Instagram Facebook how to scale how to manage your time how to get into the real estate industry wedding industry and a bunch of other stuff like that I'm adding videos to sell a video pro every single month just like this one we also have a private Facebook group where we're getting a lot of great engagement and you continue to grow asking questions learning from each other and it's just a great community so if you want to learn more about Cilla video pro just go to solo video pro calm and you can sign up for the free train that we have on the website there or just join directly so if you're interested make sure to go check it out it's sila video pro calm I know everyone's super scared of like attaining wealth and making money and doing all that type of stuff but I really want to try and break those barriers down for folks that are struggling with the pricing so I hope you got a bunch of value out of this video if you did make sure to give it a huge thumbs up and let me know in the comments section which one of these ways that you price your own videos or if there's some other way that you go about pricing thanks for tuning in my name is Ryan snod it rhymes with odd and we'll see you in next week's video peace [Music] you

Channel: Ryan Snaadt

Views: 10,941

Keywords: pricing strategies, how to price video production work, how to price video production, how to price video, how much to charge for, how much to charge for videography, video pricing strategy, make more money videography, start a video production business, how to price out a video, 4 pricing strategies for videography, how to price out video production

Id: -Hx9XKs1BE8

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2020