Who’s Making Your Videos?

At Wistia, we started our video journey the same way most businesses do: with some scrappy DIY video production involving mostly screencasts. A full 4 years passed between the moment when we starting experimenting with video and when we brought Chris Lavigne on as our full time, in-house videographer.

To better understand how other companies are currently using video and how they expect that to change next year, we ran a survey of 600 marketing professionals across all industries and company sizes (we did not specifically target Wistia customers, though by chance a few happened to use Wistia). In this post, and several to follow, we’ll be sharing the results of that survey and discussing the implications of the data.

Today, we’re going to focus specifically on the topic of video production.

Q: Who films and edits the videos you use in your business?

For a full 1/3 of respondents, an internal team handled all aspects of video production. Another 1/3 said that video production was a combined effort between an internal team and an outside agency. Combining these groups (someone check my math here), 2/3 of the marketers we surveyed have some video production capabilities in-house. Personally, I was surprised and impressed that this number was so high.

Q: How likely is your company to grow their production team?

To follow up on this question, we asked the same group of marketers about their plans to grow their in-house video production team in the coming year. Here’s what they had to say:

In good news for those on the job market, just over 50% of respondents said it was at least somewhat likely that they would hire for video production in the coming year. This gives us some indication that the amount of in-house is likely to increase in the following 12 months. Interestingly, for companies who said video production was currently done exclusively by an external agency, 8% thought it was “extremely likely” that they would hire for video production in the next year.

Read more about working with in-house videographers

Should you invest in bringing video in-house?

To be clear, there’s no “right way” or “wrong way” for a company to handle video production. In fact, as we’ve experienced firsthand here at Wistia, the best approach is likely to change over time as the size and priorities of your business shift.

The key is to periodically evaluate where video fits into your business - that should dictate whether you invest in making it a core skill of your company or whether you leave it to an outside agency.

We would love to hear how your company is making video today and whether you imagine that changing in the coming year!