Every fall, marketing leaders face a familiar conversation. They’re reviewing next year’s budget, and sooner or later someone asks what last year’s video spending accomplished.
It’s a fair question. And it’s a difficult one to answer when the budget covered production but never accounted for how the videos would be used or measured.
I’ve spent more than 30 years working in video production, much of that time in the edit suite. I’ve seen good work get approved, delivered, and quietly disappear into a folder. The video wasn’t necessarily the problem. The plan stopped when production wrapped, even though that’s when the video was supposed to start doing its job.
So when someone asks me what percentage of their marketing budget should go toward video, I start somewhere else: What do you need video to help your business accomplish?
That answer gives you a much better budget than an arbitrary percentage ever will. And when resources are limited, it helps you put more of the money toward work people will actually use.
Is there a standard percentage for video?
Not one I’d recommend using across every company.
Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts overall marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue. The CMO Survey’s January 2026 results put the mean at 8.96%, or roughly 9%, but the median was 5%. That question had 154 company responses. Those numbers offer useful context, but they describe total marketing spending, not the share you should allocate to video. Gartner’s survey also leans toward larger companies: the vast majority had revenue above $1 billion. Averages don’t necessarily tell you what your own company should spend.
A business trying to attract qualified job applicants has different content needs than one trying to help buyers make a decision during a nine-month sales cycle. Even with identical revenue, their video budgets could look very different.
I prefer to build the number from the work the videos need to do, then check whether it fits the larger marketing plan.
Start with the business problem, not a video wish list
Before you decide how many videos to make, talk to the people who will use them.
Ask your sales leader where deals tend to stall. Ask HR where promising candidates lose interest. Ask your CEO what customers regularly misunderstand about the business.
You may discover that sales needs better answers to recurring objections, while recruiting needs employees to show candidates what working there is actually like. Those are two clear reasons to produce video. They’re also much easier to defend in a budget meeting than a request for twelve new videos.
I’d start with two or three priorities. Give each one a specific result to work toward and a plan for where the content will appear.
Here’s how I would organize the budget:
| Budget area | What you’re paying for | What to look at afterward |
| Business priorities | Two or three defined uses for video | Progress against the outcome each priority supports |
| Planning and production | Scripts, interviews, crew, equipment, locations and shoot days | Useful content produced from each shoot |
| Post-production and distribution | Editing, different versions, captions, sales clips, promotion and updates | Where the content is used and how people engage |
| Measurement | Tracking links, video analytics and simple reporting | Leads, bookings, sales activity or other relevant business results |
The first row tells you what matters. The other three tell you what it will take to deliver and learn from it.
Get more from each production day
This is where a limited budget can work harder, especially when you plan beyond the first finished edit.
A production day doesn’t have to mean one finished video. With the right preparation, the same interviews and footage might support a main video, shorter social edits, clips for sales emails and answers to questions prospects keep asking.
I’ve seen a well-planned shoot supply material that can be used over six months or even a year. That’s possible when the topics, interview questions, scripts and supporting footage are planned around specific uses. It isn’t a guaranteed output from every shoot.
Imagine filming a customer story. You might produce the full testimonial for your website, a shorter version for LinkedIn and a focused clip that helps a sales rep address a common concern. You’re getting several useful pieces from the same production effort without asking the customer to come back for three separate shoots.
This is where preparation with the right production partner matters. Someone who asks how the videos will be used before working out what to shoot. Together, we can plan the interview questions, the supporting footage each edit needs, and what we can realistically capture while everyone is there. You still need to budget for editing each version. More footage doesn’t automatically mean more finished content.
Should you shoot everything at once?
Sometimes one or two shoot days a year are all the budget will allow for a particular priority. You can still make those days count.
But there’s an advantage to filming throughout the year. A quarterly schedule gives you a chance to see what people are watching, what sales is actually sharing and which customer questions are coming up. You can use that information to make the next round more useful.
An annual production plan should give you direction without locking you into twelve months of assumptions.
Don’t spend the whole budget getting to the finish line
A video’s value doesn’t end when production wraps. In many ways, that’s when the work you paid for starts to matter.
Someone needs to prepare the different formats, add captions, place the videos on the right pages, make them available to sales and decide whether paid promotion makes sense. Over time, some videos will also need updates.
Before you book the next shoot, review the existing footage with the right production partner. Work out what’s worth finishing, what needs updating, and where fresh production would make the biggest difference.
For example, a strong testimonial sitting on a hard-to-find portfolio page may do very little for your sales team. Put the right excerpt into a follow-up email, a relevant landing page or a proposal conversation, and it has a better chance of helping someone make a decision.
That doesn’t mean every video needs advertising. It means every video needs an intended audience, a place to live and someone responsible for putting it to work.
Where does the big brand film fit?
A brand film, a customer story, and a product demo do different jobs. Each deserves the care that makes it work. For a customer interview, that might mean helping someone feel comfortable enough to give an honest answer, then finding the strongest story in the edit.
When we plan those pieces together, we can work out what each one needs before the shoot. If the campaign gets someone to your website, the customer stories and demos are there to help answer their questions.
How do you show what video contributed?
Decide what success looks like before production begins. The measure should fit the reason you made the video.
| If video is meant to… | Look at… |
| Help sales move deals forward | How often reps share the content and whether video-assisted deals move differently through the pipeline |
| Support recruiting | Engagement with recruiting videos, candidate feedback and changes in application or offer-acceptance patterns |
| Build patient or customer confidence | FAQ engagement and the number of visitors who go on to book, inquire or buy |
Tracking links, video-host analytics and CRM reporting can help connect the dots. Just be careful about what the numbers prove. A prospect watching a video before booking is useful information, but it doesn’t establish that the video caused the booking.
You can report what people watched, where they went next and whether the results moved in the direction you expected. Over time, that gives you a much stronger basis for deciding what to produce again.
In the American Marketing Association’s 2026 survey of 1,412 marketers, proving ROI ranked as their biggest self-reported skills gap. That’s another reason to make measurement part of the original plan instead of trying to reconstruct it at the end of the year.
What might an annual video budget look like?
Let’s put some numbers around it. This is an illustrative planning example, not a universal rate card or a quote.
Say your company generates $20 million in annual revenue. Applying Gartner’s 7.8% figure would put the overall marketing budget at approximately $1.56 million. Your actual marketing allocation could be higher or lower.
For this example, the company has two video priorities: help shorten the sales cycle and support recruiting.
We’ll use these assumptions:
- Planning: $1,000 per shoot day for interview preparation, scripting and shot lists.
- Production: $5,000 per full shoot day for a lean three-person crew with one camera and a basic lighting and grip package.
- Post-production: $5,000 per shoot day of footage for editing, captions and shorter versions.
- Promotion: $6,000 annually, or $500 per month.
- Measurement: $3,000 annually for tracking and a simple reporting dashboard.
| Budget item | Starting plan: 2 shoot days per priority each year | Quarterly plan: 1 shoot day per priority each quarter |
| Planning | $4,000 | $8,000 |
| Production | $20,000 | $40,000 |
| Post-production and promotion | $26,000 | $46,000 |
| Measurement | $3,000 | $3,000 |
| Annual total | $53,000 | $97,000 |
| Share of illustrative marketing budget | About 3% | About 6% |
Notice how much of the investment happens outside the shoot itself. That’s intentional. Production gives you the stories and footage. Editing turns them into useful pieces; distribution puts those pieces where they can help; measurement tells you what to do differently next time. That’s how you make more of the budget you already have.
The quarterly option costs more, but it also gives the team regular opportunities to adjust what they’re making. Neither option is automatically right. The choice depends on the business need, the pace of change and what the company can support.
Here’s another way to look at those budgets. If each additional customer contributes $15,000 in first-year gross profit, four new customers would cover the $53,000 annual plan. The $97,000 quarterly plan would take seven. That’s an illustrative break-even target, not a forecast. To assess the video investment, you’d need to look at additional business it helped generate, not sales you would have won anyway.
In the next piece, I’ll walk through the equation behind that number, and how to run it on your own business.
Build your own number
You can use the same basic calculation with your own production costs and priorities.
| Item | Calculation |
| Priorities | Choose 2–3 business needs video will support |
| Planning and production | Total shoot days × (planning cost per day + production day rate) |
| Post-production and promotion | Total shoot days × estimated editing cost per shoot day, plus annual promotion |
| Measurement | Annual tracking and reporting costs |
| Total annual video budget | Add planning, production, post-production, promotion and measurement |
| Percentage of marketing budget | Video total ÷ total marketing budget × 100 |
If you don’t have production rates yet, ask two or three partners what a full day includes. Make sure you’re comparing similar crew sizes, equipment, planning and post-production scopes. A low day rate doesn’t tell you much if important parts of the work are excluded.
And if your annual budget has already been approved, you can still use this approach. Ask your production partner to help you review the plan against what you already have. You may get more value by finishing or updating existing material, then planning new shoots around what’s missing.
Annual plan or project-by-project?
I’d build an annual plan around the business priorities, then leave room for individual projects as needs change.
Project-by-project spending can be appropriate for a one-time event or unexpected need. The trouble comes when every request is treated separately. You can end up with a collection of finished videos that don’t support one another or connect to a shared business goal.
An annual plan gives the work continuity. It helps you reuse production resources, build a useful library and make decisions based on what you’ve learned instead of starting from scratch each time.
A few common budgeting questions
How much does a corporate video cost?
It depends on the crew, locations, production days and editing requirements. For how to frame video costs for leadership, see CRM Studios’ guide to the three numbers your CEO actually cares about. An annual plan brings those project costs together around the work your business needs done.
Should paid promotion be included?
Include it if promotion is part of the distribution plan, and make sure it’s not counted twice in your broader media budget. You don’t have to put paid support behind every video.
Should we hire in-house or work with a production partner?
Your internal team knows the business and can capture useful moments as they happen. The right production partner brings another set of skills: shaping the story, guiding interviews, managing the shoot, and editing the material for its different uses. Look at where your team needs that support and budget for it alongside the work you can handle internally. CRM Studios’ guide to planning the right production support for your team explores those decisions.
When should we set the budget?
Ideally during your Q4 planning process. Agree on the outcomes and measurement approach before the first project begins, rather than waiting until the next budget conversation.
Make the budget work beyond the shoot
You don’t need a magic percentage to build a responsible video budget. You need to know what the content should help accomplish, what it will cost to produce and put to work, and how you’ll tell whether it helped. That matters even more when every dollar has to earn its place.
After more than 30 years in this business, I keep coming back to the same point: the shoot is only part of the investment. The more clearly we understand what a client needs the video to do after delivery, the better decisions we can make before the cameras roll.
If you’re working through your 2027 video plan and want another perspective on where the money will make the most difference, let’s talk .
Sources
- Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey: CMO Spend article; May 11, 2026 press release. The press release provides the company-size context.
- American Marketing Association, State of Marketing Careers Report 2026, p. 26: AMA report page. Proving ROI was the biggest self-reported skills gap among 1,412 respondents.
- The CMO Survey (Deloitte, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and AMA), January 2026, Topline Report, p. 39. Marketing spending as a share of revenue: mean 8.96% (roughly 9%); median 5%; n=154 company responses to this question.
