Part 2 : A Product Marketer’s Perspective – Challenges with Video

From a product marketing perspective, I found that my requirements for marketing videos were often for developing short, explanatory videos highlighting key capabilities and aspects of product features that our company was releasing every two weeks. With multiple product lines – each with their own roadmap and release schedule; our team could easily have 50+ video requests in the queue for our video production team to develop. 

My biggest challenge was that I had nowhere else to go to create videos (either our own internal video team or an external video marketing agency). BTW, this production team was a first class set of talent – and of course, we had a world class external video production team – but alas, budgets and timelines could not support our need for this level of production.
Probably the most frustrating part is that we really did not need superior video production that these highly talented teams could deliver – we just needed good solid video, branded to our company’s standards and most importantly with the ability to generate 10-15 of these a week (e.g. webinar summaries, product feature release videos, short customer use case discussions).

Netting it out – the problems with video are:


1. Long Creation Process – from video script creation, to capturing demo highlights, to editing, producing and deploying – these videos could take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months to develop.
2. Limited Bandwidth & Scope – if you rely on an agency, you really have to ensure you have done your scripts exceptionally well. Even with your own internal team. The product marketer is the subject matter expert and thus needs to be engaged with whomever is developing the video – and this can be difficult at best.
3. Video Equipment Limitations – this can be challenging but here again is where I as a product marketer would draw the line from a $25K first class marketing production video, and a 2 minute “how to” video requiring minimum equipment purchases – ideally I must be able to do it all on my Surface Pro!
4. Changing Talent Pool – dealing with internal and external agencies results in a constant swirl of new people, talent et al., where the product marketer has to re-educate them on all aspects of their product lines.
5. High cost-per-video – all of this comes at $4-5K per minute for a video to be produced – and of course, at a 4-6 week interval of time for video script, creation, production and deployment –