Pricing on Website for Videography Business

That question is a double edged sword. GOOD video work simply is not cheap, and a lot of that has to do with the time needed to make it "Good" So you can easily over price and stop that lower pay flow, which in the beginning may help you pay the bills. IF you price to low then you need to be concerned with being considered cheap, and that's not good either.

I might offer 2 lower end packages and be very specific as to what they are and what they include. One being at your location. 1 hour shoot. 30 second web ready video, and the next being the clients location. 1 hour video with 30 second web ready video. the third option something like "Thinking Bigger Call for a Quote".

the key here is to have the Promo video displaying the "Thinking Bigger" with 1 or 2 each of the lessor package product, and having the text there to explain this.

You are doing a few things with this. you are defining there is a "travel charge" ( the client location is going to cost more than the your location package ) You are showcasing your portfolio in such a way that shows you can do way more than the prices on the site indicate. You basically are setting yourself up to demand top dollar for projects that require top dollar video.

A real life example... I have a partner in West Palm Beach that for the most part does Videography for Weddings. You goto his site and there are 4 Promo videos. 3 of which are of horses. and 1 is a 5 minute wedding promo. The MORE lucrative side of his business is videoing horses to be sold.

He has actually broken down his pricing structure. Taking video is taking video. he charges by the hour. 1 camera is X 2 cameras X and so on. He then breaks his editing based on end product length. Wedding are X per minute and Horses are Y per minute. ( There is obviously far less overall editing with a wedding than a video to sell a $100,000 to Million dollar Stud ) He then breaks down his hourly for travel to the shoot. If the travel time exceeds 2 hours he then also charges for the return trip.

He recently went to Scotland for a shoot. and was paid 48 hours travel time 6 hours for a shoot and 5 minutes of video. Right under $10,000 was the bill. ( Travel, hotel and food were paid by the client as well ) Just to give you an idea...

The example for all that it is worth, it has to be taken with a grain of salt. His pricing and ability to lay it all out evolved. everything to start was quote, then he got tired of answering the phone to give quotes. then he listed basic package pricing and got tired of answer the questions about "I don't want that how much is it" etc So ended up with a simpler - cleaner time based model.

Hope that Helps!

In my narrow point of view there are only 2 types of websites when it comes to selling a product and or service. There are sites that ACTUALLY sell the product or service IE they have the price listed. And then there is the sites that do not have the price and these I label as lead generation sites.

When you get down to brass tacks the sites appear very much the same but as we all know they are fundamentally different. Again in my narrow point of view I think the biggest difference is in the buyers time line where they fall.

Sites with prices are there 24/7 regardless of the time of day that a prospect has hit the tipping point to buy to allow for the commitment to be made. The world no longer operates on a 9 to 5 mentality and I believe that pricing on a website caters to this.

Lead gen sites require further action. be it picking up the phone or filling out a form. There is simply a gap in the connection between you and the prospect. You are requiring the prospect to meet your schedule, and not working within theirs.

A specific industry that comes to mind that displays this split in thinking is the used car industry. many sites have prices, and then there are many others that say "Call for Pricing" I can tell you that from my own personal professional experience, the car dealer websites WITH pricing outperform the lead gen no price variety by a scary margin.

The example I gave above about my partner that does horse videos. there simply are not that many variables. What he shoots, How he shoots, and Where he shoots, does not overly change that much. Hence the more static pricing. He basically only shoots 2 types of videos and understand the time needed to complete these projects.

The OP is in a different situation, He does not know what he is going to get, but I think if he / she were to look back apon his past experience he could clearly identify some specific situation that would lend itself to increasing production time. Be it multiple locations or multiple actors or whatever the variables may be.

The fact remains these are still going to be static variables, and pricing could be made accordingly. I also believe that the OP is coming out of a "Employee" relationship and using the environment he was in as a base, and simply based on the OP itself you can see the model was flawed, and I believe the pricing was flawed as well. These are without question things that need to be looked at.

[QUOTE=misterme;9532054]Not for nothing but that's not a good example at all. Maybe you think it is but I'm in a similar industry and can tell you first hand it isn't. I don't even have to see his site to know weddings aren't that lucrative for him. I can tell from your description of how he runs his video business. And $10,000 to hassle traveling from West Palm Beach to Scotland and back? That's severely underpaid. I can get $10,000 or more just working in my area of the country and be back home sleeping in my own bed that very same night.[QUOTE]

That would be one of those examples where it shows that you stick to your pricing win loose or draw. For an added $5000+ he got basically a weeks vacation and the total project time was less than 15 hours. But the constant was the fact he gets $1000 per minute of produced video with this market as compared to $50 for weddings.