It is the most common state of affairs in the industry, and it is understandable — the work comes from referrals and social, and building a site is the job you never get to. It also means that when a marketing manager with a four thousand pound budget goes looking for a production company in your city, you are not there.
The work, laid out
Full films rather than sixty-second teasers, and honest pricing. Couples watch a whole film before they enquire; they will not judge you on a montage.
The work with the budgets. Case studies with a brief, an approach and a result read very differently to a marketing manager than a showreel does.
Monthly retainers are the steadiest money in video and almost nobody advertises them. A page that says what a day's shoot produces will win them.
Same-day edits, multi-camera, live streaming. Specific enough that an events agency can tell you are equipped for it.
The regional work that goes to whoever appears when somebody searches. Naming the sectors is how you get found for them.
Public liability, drone permissions, backup recording. Any agency booking you will check, and finding it easily makes you the safe choice.
They are emotional buyers, they watch on a phone in bed, and they are choosing on feel. They want a full film they can cry at, a starting price, and a sense of whether you will be a calm presence on the day or a man with a gimbal walking backwards up the aisle.
They enquire late at night, often at a fortnight’s notice for a viewing of your work, and they compare three of you at once.
Entirely rational. They need to know you have done something like their project before, that you can meet a deadline, that you invoice properly and that you carry the right insurance to get on site.
They are also, quietly, checking whether you look like a business or a bloke. A proper website with case studies, a company name and a phone number is doing a lot of that work before you ever speak.
One site can serve both. It just has to be built knowing they are different people.
A single commercial project typically covers the site for two or three years.
Design, writing, hosting, domain and every change you ask for.
You are already editing until midnight. This is the job you get to stop doing.
Common questions
On YouTube or Vimeo, embedded into the page. Hosting video files on a small business website is a good way to make it slow and expensive, and both platforms handle adaptive streaming far better than we ever could.
That is usually because somebody put an autoplaying background film on the homepage. We use a poster frame and load the player when somebody presses play, which is why our pages open in about a second on a phone.
Send us the link and a couple of lines and it goes up. Included, however often, which is the whole reason this is a monthly service rather than a one-off build.
A from figure, usually. Agencies filter hard on budget and being absent from the shortlist is worse than being at the top of it. For weddings a package price is close to essential.
£47 a month, live in about a fortnight, and new work added whenever you send it.