Pro Motion Media Blog

“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s unwise to pay too lit­tle. When you pay too much you lose a lit­tle money, that is all. When you pay too lit­tle, you some­times lose every­thing, because the thing you bought was inca­pable of doing the thing you bought it to do. The com­mon law of busi­ness bal­ance pro­hibits pay­ing a lit­tle and get­ting a lot. It can’t be done. If you deal with the low­est bid­der, it’s as well to add some­thing for the risk you run. And if you have to do that, you will have enough to pay for some­thing bet­ter. – John Ruskin (1819–1900)”

I recently found this quote on Face­book and it really struck a chord with me. I have writ­ten before about the grow­ing trend of busi­nesses cre­at­ing their own cor­po­rate videos and engag­ing in other do-it-yourself projects in an effort to save money. It seems like in many cases, the old adage “you get what you pay for” rings very true in the world of business.

Every busi­ness owner, be it a small enter­prise or a large cor­po­ra­tion, needs to place a mon­e­tary value on their time. Once they do this, it becomes eas­ier to see whether under­tak­ing cer­tain busi­ness aspects on their own is worth it in the long run. Do not mis­un­der­stand; vlog­ging (video blog­ging) can be a use­ful tool for busi­ness own­ers, but it should not take the place of a pro­fes­sional video being made for a web­site or a larger audi­ence. In all too many cases, try­ing to save money can actu­ally cause more harm and cre­ate a loss of revenue.

We have all heard that time is money. When a busi­ness owner is con­sid­er­ing whether cre­at­ing a video for his web­site is a good way to save money, he needs to con­sider how much money he will actu­ally save in the long run. If he spends sev­eral hours cre­at­ing and edit­ing a self-made video, is that the most effec­tive and cost-efficient way he can be spend­ing his time? Or might his ser­vices be more help­ful in other aspects of the business?

Also, a poorly made or ama­teur video will not gar­ner the type of atten­tion a busi­ness might need. If a viewer is vis­it­ing a pro­fes­sional web­site and sees a video of poor qual­ity, his opin­ion of the busi­ness itself may go down. He will leave the web­site feel­ing dis­ap­pointed or amused, and will choose to avoid that busi­ness entirely. In this case, not only has the busi­ness owner wasted valu­able time mak­ing a vlog, he has also steered a cus­tomer away from his busi­ness. This sce­nario causes the enter­prise to lose money on two dif­fer­ent levels.

A good way to gauge the effec­tive­ness of a do-it-yourself video is to track the num­ber of hits on the video, either via YouTube or a tracker on the web­site. Within a short period of time, a busi­ness owner will be able to tell whether or not his video is help­ing or hin­der­ing the busi­ness. If there are very few views or the cus­tomer feed­back is neu­tral or neg­a­tive, it might be time to con­sider whether or not it is worth it. Not just in terms of time, but in poten­tial cus­tomers lost-both of these trans­late directly into money.

There are many aspects of busi­ness which this applies to. For exam­ple, busi­ness cards can be down­loaded and printed off of the inter­net, fly­ers can be mass pro­duced using a free tem­plate, and hun­dreds more “free” options are avail­able for busi­nesses. How­ever, the image that is being por­trayed is not usu­ally a pos­i­tive one, and in most cases it is a wise use of resources to hire a pro­fes­sional to han­dle those types of things. After all, some­thing that is free can often cost more in the long run.