How Much Should a Business Spend on Video Marketing?

There is no sensible universal percentage of turnover that every business should spend on video marketing.

A manufacturer using one case-study film to support £500,000 sales conversations has a different decision from a café trying to publish useful social content every week. The same £3,000 could be cautious for one business and impossible to justify for another.

The better starting point is:

What business job does the video need to do, what will it take to make and distribute it properly, and what result would make the spend worthwhile?

That gives you a budget you can explain.

It also prevents a common mistake: spending everything on the production and leaving nothing — in money or staff time — to put the finished video in front of the people it was made for.

A video production budget and a video marketing budget are not the same thing

A production quote answers:

What will it cost to make these agreed films?

A marketing budget answers:

What resources will it take to make the films useful to the business?

Those are related, but they are not interchangeable.

A complete video-marketing budget can include:

Some of those costs may be external invoices.

Others are internal staff time.

A marketing manager spending two days organising contributors, reviewing drafts and publishing the campaign is still using business resource even if no supplier bills for those hours.

Our UK video production cost guide covers the making-the-video side in more detail. This article is deliberately broader.

Start with the result, then work backwards to the spend

“We should invest more in video” is difficult to budget.

“We need more qualified operations managers to understand our maintenance service before the sales call” is much easier.

The second statement starts to tell you:

• who needs to see the content;
• what they currently do not understand;
• what evidence the video should provide;
• where it should appear;
• what a useful next action looks like.

That is enough to start designing a campaign.

A video production brief should record the audience, problem, intended use, required deliverables, deadline and available budget or range.

You do not need to know the cameras, lenses or editing hours.

You do need to know what the business is trying to change.

Use three pots: make it, get it seen, learn from it

A simple way to prevent lopsided budgeting is to separate three jobs.

1. Make it

This covers the production itself:

• preparation;
• contributors;
• filming;
• editing;
• graphics;
• captions;
• required versions.

For straightforward Camera Guys productions, our current published pricing starts at £249 for the first on-location hour per operator, £99 for each consecutive additional hour, and £49 per editing hour. Larger or specialist productions are scoped around the actual brief.

Those are production rates.

They are not a complete marketing budget.

2. Get it seen

Distribution does not always mean paid advertising.

A film might be used by:

• the sales team in proposals or follow-up emails;
• a product or service page;
• an existing customer mailing list;
• LinkedIn or another social channel;
• an exhibition;
• a recruitment page;
• paid media.

An organisation with strong existing access to the right audience may spend little or nothing on media.

That does not make distribution free.

Somebody still needs to publish the asset, write the surrounding copy, update the page, brief the sales team or schedule the campaign.

If paid promotion is part of the plan, treat the media budget as its own decision rather than quietly taking it out of the production allowance halfway through.

3. Learn from it

Reserve enough resource to find out what happened.

That may involve:

• checking whether the film was actually published in the planned places;
• confirming tracking works;
• recording qualified enquiries;
• comparing sales-team usage;
• reviewing audience retention or click behaviour;
• checking what questions customers still ask;
• deciding what to change next.

Our guide to measuring video marketing ROI explains how to separate views, commercial outcomes and attribution.

A campaign with no review point can become a repeating expense rather than a learning system.

Four video budgets can look completely different

There is no one correct production-to-promotion ratio because videos do different jobs.

Budget shape 1: the evergreen sales asset

Imagine an engineering business wants a customer case study that salespeople can use for several years.

The audience is narrow and already accessible through the sales team.

The budget may reasonably lean towards:

• a strong interview;
• technically accurate supporting footage;
• careful editing;
• a useful website page;
• perhaps several sales-friendly cutdowns.

Paid media might be minimal.

That does not mean distribution was forgotten. The sales process itself is the distribution system.

Budget shape 2: the paid campaign

Now imagine a new brand or product with very little existing audience.

A beautiful advert is not useful if nobody sees it.

This budget may need separate allowances for:

• creative and production;
• alternative advert versions;
• landing-page work;
• media spend;
• campaign management;
• tracking and testing.

In this situation, putting 100% of the budget into filming would leave the campaign incomplete.

Budget shape 3: the regular content system

A business wants to answer common questions on social media every week.

The useful investment may be a repeatable production system rather than one expensive hero film.

That could combine:

• internally filmed updates;
• planned professional filming days;
• efficient editing templates;
• a regular approval process;
• a realistic publishing cadence.

Our guide to whether to hire a videographer or film it yourself explains why those two approaches do not have to compete.

Routine content can be made internally while professional production is reserved for the assets where it adds the most value.

Budget shape 4: the content library

Sometimes the useful investment is capturing a lot of reusable material while the right people, location and activities are available.

At Southwold Maize Maze, one videographer spent six hours on location and the production was planned around more than 100 eventual deliverables across the attraction and Old Hall Café & Walks.

The saving came from shared access and planned source material, not from pretending 100 edits require no work.

The project is a useful example of spending more intelligently on one well-planned production day rather than repeatedly rebuilding the same setup.

A simple break-even check before you approve the campaign

You can test the scale of a proposed budget without pretending you can predict the future.

Use contribution per incremental customer, not headline revenue.

A simple question is:

How many additional customers would need to be attributable to this campaign for its direct cost to be recovered?

For example:

• total campaign cost: £4,000
• contribution generated by one additional customer before campaign cost: £1,000

The campaign would need:

£4,000 ÷ £1,000 = 4 incremental customers

to recover that direct campaign cost.

Now change the business economics:

• total campaign cost: £4,000
• contribution per additional customer: £250

The same campaign would need:

£4,000 ÷ £250 = 16 incremental customers

That does not tell you whether the campaign will actually deliver four or sixteen customers.

It does not solve attribution.

It does show why the same video budget can make sense for one business and look much harder to justify for another.

If your finance team uses a different definition of contribution or acquisition cost, use the business's normal accounting basis consistently.

For a fuller financial calculation, use our video ROI guide.

Should video get a fixed percentage of the marketing budget?

A fixed percentage can be useful for internal planning.

It is weak as a strategy.

Two businesses can have the same turnover and very different:

• margins;
• customer values;
• sales cycles;
• market awareness;
• content libraries;
• internal teams;
• access to audiences;
• competitive situations.

A percentage cannot know whether your next £2,000 would be better spent on a customer film, a landing-page rebuild, paid distribution or something unrelated to video.

Use percentages to put boundaries around a plan if your organisation works that way.

Do not mistake the boundary for the reason.

What do current benchmarks tell us?

Wistia's 2026 State of Video surveyed more than 900 professionals and analysed more than 13 million videos hosted on its platform. It reported that almost 40% of surveyed companies spent under $5,000 on video production in 2025, while just over 30% spent more than $5,000. For video promotion and advertising, 41% spent under $20,000 and 28% spent above $20,000. Read Wistia's 2026 report.

Those figures show a wide range.

They do not establish what a UK business should spend.

The sample is not a representative survey of all UK companies, the numbers are in US dollars, and respondents differ enormously in size and video usage.

That is exactly why benchmarks should provide context rather than dictate your budget.

Our 2026 video marketing statistics resource keeps UK evidence separate from international and platform-specific benchmarks for the same reason.

Should you spend more on the video or more on promoting it?

Ask which constraint is currently limiting the campaign.

The content is the problem

Spend more attention on production when:

• the offer is difficult to explain;
• you need evidence, demonstration or a credible customer voice;
• the recording cannot easily be repeated;
• the film will have a long useful life;
• poor sound or visuals would undermine the message;
• several useful assets can be captured efficiently from the same access.

Paid reach will not repair a film that never explains the value.

Audience access is the problem

Spend more attention on distribution when:

• the film is already clear and useful;
• the business has little existing reach;
• a specific paid audience is part of the campaign;
• the destination page needs work;
• the sales team has not been shown how to use the asset;
• the content is sitting in a folder rather than appearing in the buyer journey.

Production quality does not create distribution by itself.

You do not yet know which is the problem

Run a smaller complete test.

That means enough production to create something credible, a real way to reach the intended audience and a defined review point.

A cheap film with no distribution teaches very little.

A large media spend behind an untested message can also become an expensive way to learn.

Spend more where failure would be expensive

Not every video deserves the same production budget.

Consider two pieces of content.

Video A: a 30-second update explaining that the office closes early on Friday.

Video B: the customer case study shown to nearly every prospect before a high-value purchasing decision.

Video A may be perfect as a quick internal phone recording.

Video B may justify better preparation, interview direction, sound, lighting and editing because:

• it is harder to repeat;
• more people may see it;
• it could remain useful for much longer;
• the commercial consequence of getting it wrong is larger.

Budget according to importance, lifespan, repeatability and audience value, not simply runtime.

A two-minute homepage film can justify more investment than a 40-minute internal recording because they are solving different problems.

When the budget is tight, cut scope before cutting the foundations

Reducing the budget does not have to mean making the same ambitious brief badly.

Change the brief.

Useful options include:

• film at one location instead of three;
• prioritise one audience rather than everybody;
• create one strong case study before commissioning a series;
• use internal phone content for routine updates;
• reduce the number of finished versions;
• batch related content when contributors and locations overlap;
• reuse valid existing footage;
• postpone optional animation or specialist equipment;
• build around the channels your audience actually uses.

Protect the elements that make the chosen asset usable:

• intelligible sound;
• an understandable message;
• accurate claims;
• the footage needed to prove the point;
• enough editing time;
• required captions or accessibility work;
• a clear next step.

Saving £200 by removing the only useful interview-preparation session can be poor value if it leaves the most important contributor unprepared.

Removing a second filming location that adds little to the story may be a genuine saving.

Ask what the cost buys before removing it.

Do not create more video than the business can actually use

Marketing teams can become very good at commissioning content and surprisingly bad at deploying it.

Before increasing the budget, check whether the organisation has capacity to:

• write briefs;
• prepare contributors;
• review edits;
• approve claims;
• publish the work;
• answer responses;
• update the website;
• analyse what happened;
• retire content when it becomes inaccurate.

Our guide to how often a business should create new video recommends setting cadence from the complete workflow rather than a social-media posting target.

If the team can properly use four new films this quarter, commissioning twenty can create an expensive approval queue.

More production is not automatically more marketing.

Batch when the content shares people and locations

One filming day can be very efficient when several useful videos genuinely need the same:

• contributor;
• room;
• product;
• process;
• lighting setup;
• location.

Our example of creating a month of social content in one filming day shows how eight distinct pieces can be planned around common customer questions and a shared shoot.

The important word is planned.

Do not book a camera for eight hours and assume an endless content library will emerge automatically.

Each intended film still needs:

• a subject;
• a useful opening;
• appropriate footage;
• editing;
• approval;
• a destination.

Batch production saves duplicated setup and access.

It does not make post-production disappear.

Treat internal time as part of the investment

Cash cost is easy to see because somebody sends an invoice.

Internal cost is easier to ignore.

A campaign may require:

• a managing director's interview;
• technical review by an engineer;
• marketing-team preparation;
• legal or compliance approval;
• website changes;
• sales-team briefing;
• campaign monitoring.

Record those commitments.

You do not need to assign an artificial hourly rate to every meeting if that is not how your organisation budgets.

But you should know the work exists.

A cheap production that absorbs weeks of senior management time is not necessarily the cheapest route overall.

Put a review date into the budget before you start

Decide when the business will ask:

Did we actually use this content, and what should we do next?

For an evergreen sales film, review:

• whether the sales team uses it;
• whether the claims remain current;
• whether prospects arrive better informed;
• whether the destination page still makes sense.

For a paid campaign, review:

• audience delivery;
• meaningful engagement;
• conversion actions;
• qualified enquiries;
• cost against the agreed commercial measure.

For regular social content, review:

• which topics earned useful attention;
• which questions prompted follow-up;
• what was ignored;
• whether the team can sustain the publishing process.

LinkedIn's current guidance similarly recommends choosing campaign measures around the objective rather than judging every video against the same metric. LinkedIn's video advertising guidance separates awareness, consideration and conversion objectives.

That framework is useful when LinkedIn is your chosen channel.

It is not evidence that every business needs to advertise there.

What should you tell a video production company about your budget?

If you have a real ceiling, share it.

That does not give a supplier permission to automatically spend every pound.

It allows them to answer a more useful question:

What can we complete properly within this amount?

For example:

We have approximately £4,000 available for production and the associated video campaign. We need to explain the service to facilities managers and give the sales team something they can use after enquiries. We have our own email list and website team, but no paid-media plan yet.

That is much more useful than:

How much for a corporate video?

The production company can then identify what belongs inside its scope and what still needs an owner elsewhere.

Our corporate video production service can scale around a defined brief, from focused interviews to larger multi-location productions.

So, how much should your business spend?

Enough to complete one useful, properly deployed piece of work before chasing an arbitrary annual number.

That may mean a modest internally distributed customer film.

It may mean a regular content system combining DIY and professional production.

It may mean a substantial launch campaign with several videos and a separate paid-media budget.

The appropriate amount comes from:

business value + campaign scope + audience access + internal capacity + evidence

—not from a universal percentage of revenue.

If you already have a budget range, send us the business problem, audience and intended use. We can help define the production part of the plan and make clear which costs sit elsewhere in the campaign.