Using Stock Videos to Minimize Your Budget
One of the biggest reasons people don't incorporate video in their marketing strategy is because they believe it will blow their marketing budget out of the water. Instead of spending a ton of time and money on filming original footage for your video, you can get creative and try using stock photos and video!
Using Stock Photos
Using stock photos is a great option to consider when you're trying to keep your budget low. There are several royalty free photo libraries you can find free images for multiple purposes, including using it on your website, ads, and videos.
Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash
One of our favorite free options is Unsplash. You can search through thousands of photos and easily download them from the site at no cost, and no sign in required. Their website states that "Crediting isn’t required, but is appreciated and allows photographers to gain exposure."
The best thing about Unsplash is that the photos don't look like cheesy stock photos. You know how some photo libraries are cringe-worthy because they look so posed and contrived? Well since Unsplash is a library of diverse lifestyle photographers, the images are natural and unique.
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Using Stock Videos
We've all seen the viral videos on Facebook and YouTube that retell news articles and summarize blog posts. They can be pretty entertaining and if aimed to sell a product, can be pretty convincing!
Here's an example of a video that uses a majority of stock video, with the exception of the occasional pop culture gif.
The stock video help tell the whole story without needing to send a crew to film these scenes. This is how Now This can create hundreds of these videos without generating large costs.
Here's an example of how we at The Bear's Den incorporate stock photo and stock video for a client.
After we finalized the script, we found matching video and photos that corresponded to the content on screen. This allowed us to work quickly and our costs were much lower than going on site and filming the videos ourselves.
