How to Plan Your Annual Video Marketing Budget (2027 Guide)

Lapse Productions has produced corporate video in Toronto since 2014, and this guide shows you how to plan an annual video marketing budget from the ground up. You will see which lines to include, how to split the money between brand and campaign work, a sample year priced in Canadian dollars, and when to book each project so the budget is spent on schedule instead of in a rush in December.

You will also find our rate card, a worked example with real numbers, and a worksheet you can copy into your own plan.

How much should you budget for video marketing?

Start with the videos, not a percentage. The cost of video depends on what you make, so a rule like “spend 20% of marketing on video” tells you very little. A company that needs one recruitment video and a company that needs a customer story every quarter will have very different budgets, even at the same revenue.

Build the number in four steps:

1. List every video you want this year. Include the ones tied to fixed dates: conferences, product launches, hiring pushes, the annual meeting.
2. Give each one a single business goal. Applications, booked meetings, event registrations, or sales the video will support. A video with no goal is the first one to cut.
3. Price each project. Use a quote, or the building blocks below and our guide to what a corporate video costs for a first estimate.
4. Add a reserve and a promotion line. Then total it by quarter, so you can see when the money goes out.

Here are the building blocks from the estimate builder on our pricing page. Editing is priced by video type and length, so a few common edits are listed as examples.

Every edit includes basic motion and text graphics, licensed music, and two rounds of revisions. Raw footage is included.

Once planning, filming, and editing are added up, most single corporate videos at Lapse Productions land between about $3,410 and $8,000. Every project is still quoted line by line against your scope. The Toronto video production pricing page lists the full rate card, and our corporate video production services page shows the formats we produce.

What should an annual video budget include?

Most first-time budgets only count the shoot and the edit. These are the lines that usually go missing:

How should you split the budget between brand and campaign videos?

Aim for close to half and half. In The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, published by LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, Les Binet and Peter Field studied B2B campaigns and found the best results came from roughly 46% of spend on brand building and 54% on sales activation. They present that as a guide, not a precise target.

The reason is timing. Research by Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, known as the 95:5 rule, estimates that only about 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any given time. Brand videos reach the 95% who are not buying yet, so you are the company they remember when they are. Campaign videos help the 5% who are buying now choose you. A budget that funds only one side misses one of those two groups.

The 9 types of corporate videos guide explains each format if you are deciding which ones belong in your year.

What does a sample annual video plan look like?

Here is a worked example for a mid-sized Toronto B2B company that hires every year, attends one major conference, and sells through a sales team. Each figure is built from the line items in our estimate builder and includes the 10% project management fee. They are not packages, and your own quote would be itemized against your scope.

Paid promotion is not included. Set it as its own line.

Of the $16,087.50 that goes to videos, the brand video is 46% and the testimonial and event work is 54%, right on the Binet and Field split. The anchor video lands in Q1 so every later project can link back to it, and the reserve covers the request that always arrives mid-year, such as a leadership announcement or a last-minute event. Want to test a different mix? The estimate builder totals any combination for you.

Here is what two of those lines can look like, from the Lapse Productions portfolio: a promotional video of the kind that anchors a year, and an event recap.

Promotional video for Spirit of Math (1:11). A brand piece like this anchors the website, sales decks, and the cutdowns made from it.

Event recap for Valery, 2025 (1:26). One event day can also supply speaker clips and a teaser for next year.

How do you get more video from the same budget?

• Batch interviews into one filming day. One location can usually handle up to six interviews in a day, which turns one setup into several videos.
• Plan the cutdowns in the script. Social versions, short ads, and sales clips are cheapest when the shoot is designed for them from the start.
• Shoot photos on the same day. Headshots and brand stills on a video day avoid paying for a second setup.
• Capture extra b-roll. General footage of your team, space, and product feeds later edits without another shoot.
• Reuse event footage. One conference can supply a recap, speaker clips, and the promo for next year’s event.
• Consolidate feedback. Each extra round of scattered notes adds about a week to a project. One reviewer with merged notes keeps the schedule and the budget intact.

Working with the same team all year also helps: they already know your brand, your people, and your approval process. Our post on working with one video team long term covers why.

When should you book each project?

Earlier than you think. Most corporate videos take 4 to 8 weeks from kickoff to final delivery, and a company profile or animated explainer can take 8 to 12 weeks. Our guide to how long video production takes breaks this down by video type.

Check your fiscal year too. The Government of Canada and the Ontario government both run fiscal years from April 1 to March 31, so public sector buyers may need work delivered and invoiced by the end of March. If your budget has to be spent by a set date, give your production company that date at kickoff. A project that starts in late November may not deliver until January.

How do you know if your video budget worked?

Judge each video by the goal you gave it, not by views. Views tell you a video was seen, not whether it paid for itself. A table like this one is also what gets next year’s budget approved, because it shows finance what each dollar did.

Video on your own site also supports search. Our guide to how video content helps SEO and AI visibility explains how.

A video budget worksheet you can copy

Copy this table into a spreadsheet and fill in one row per video. Total the estimate column by quarter.

Frequently asked questions