The marketing media hype these days is all about how brands expect to increase their spend on video. But let’s face the reality- whether your company boasts an awesomely abundant budget or you are working on a shoestring allowance, you still need to be equally as smart on how you go about investing in video. It’s a super-crowded digital world out there saturated by brands and consumers all wanting in on the action, and with video ROI being a tricky challenge to gauge, spending more when success is uncertain or even hard to define can certainly be risky.

Great news to you marketers is that this insane increase in video demand is creating novel business models in the video production industry that benefit you in newly valuable ways. Crowdsourcing has been a disruptive new solution for brands, helping marketers find creative edges to their campaigns while also giving them the extra value of paying a low cost for it. Since the talent community is digitally managed, overhead is extremely low, enabling tremendous cost savings to be shifted to the client. Because the creative talent comes from all over the globe, marketers get to push out their RFP and get a colorful range of original creative pitches back to consider. So in essence, you’re getting equal if not greater value of a product for a much lower cost- how is that for an attractive value function?

As a marketer, you have a strong understanding of what your brand represents, who your target audience is, and what your message to them should be- so if you are looking for more creative inspiration without busting the bank, then why not consider crowdsourcing? Agile and smarter crowdsourcing agencies (ahem, like GeniusRocket) carefully comb through applicants vying for a coveted membership to the talent community and only induct the most proven video professionals, ensuring that you’ll never deal with the disappointment of shoddy work.

If you do use crowdsourcing through a solid agency, imagine how you can then allocate any extra surplus from your budget to make your campaign even more effective. The most basic marketing tenet is that campaigns need an integrated marketing mix- maybe you can allocate those extra funds to amp up your video distribution and social media strategies. Or maybe you’ll even have extra funds to pump to another video that is aimed at your secondary target segment. Think about how much you can strengthen your campaign by squeezing more out of each dollar.

GeniusRocket’s intentions are not to replace agency of records- rather, we want to complement and enhance the options marketers seek in today’s world, especially as we all work together to figure out how exactly we will leverage video to engage with the consumer. When ROI metrics are so fuzzy in the digital space, at least one thing has proven to be clear: that you can get more out of your marketing budget with effective crowdsourcing.