Hey, creative, do you do bundle pricing? You know what bundle pricing is? I get this question actually, uh, pretty often, especially from other videography companies. They want to know, um, should they bundle? I have thoughts, but, uh, first if you aren’t familiar with what bundling is, it goes like this. And I’ll use video as an example cuz we all films, right? That that’s what we do every day. Um, you might have a client come to you and say, Hey, we want to work with you and we want to do a series of videos. Or sometimes, depending on the client, you’ll have, like, we, we wanna do a, a whole year’s worth of video content or something like that. And the idea is whether they ask for it or not, usually clients don’t even ask for bundle pricing. But, but for some reason, videographers or, or creatives feel like I they have to do it out of hand, which I’ll, I’ll talk about in a second.
But the idea is if you are gonna do multiple items, say videos, and we bundle them into one long, one big group, that means you can drop the price on the individual items. So the overall cost to the client is lower than it would be if they were buying each of these items individually. Now, that’s an obvious advantage to a client. Um, the perceived advantage, at least to you, the creative is you think, oh, well I’m gonna get a bigger chunk of money guaranteed instead of them maybe only doing, uh, you know, five items instead of 10 items. And that logic, it’s not bad logic. I mean, it may I understand, uh, uh, guaranteeing or, or shoring up our revenue streams is a hard thing in creative businesses. And I, and I understand that nerves. But here’s the, uh, so here’s the problem with that to a degree, and then I’ll explain where I bundle and where we don’t is, I don’t like this reflexive bundling stuff that you do, especially if a client hasn’t asked for it.
I’ve had this happen to me twice over the last couple weeks. I’ll have young people, young creative people, and they’ll message me and go, Hey, I have one on the line. I have a, I have a, a prospect and, and they want me to do multiple things over a period of time. And then they’ll, this, this, these people will send me their pricing breakdown to get some advice on it and they’ll say, Hey, what do you, what do you think? And then at the end they’ll say, oh, and if, if they do all this, I’ll bundle them together and drop the price per item. And I’ll ask like, the decline, ask for this. And they’ll say, no, but I think it’ll be a better, I’m like, well then why are you do, why are you preemptively, um, dropping your price when the client didn’t even ask for it?
Don’t do that. That’s a bad habit. First of all, it’s not good for you. Obvious, for obvious reasons, it’s not good for your client. Think about what that does. Your client comes to you because they want to be confident in the what you’re going to deliver to them. You bring trust and confidence. I’ve talked a lot about trust. Trust is more than price. I did a whole episode on it. Your client wants to feel like you are confident in what you do. That gives them reassurance. So when you come to them right out of the box and say, here are my prices. Oh, by the way, if you do a bunch of these, I’ll drop my price. That’s a shaky thing. And it, and it makes it sound like you’re inflating your prices on purpose just so you can drop them. I talked about this in the episode on minimum level of engagement too. It’s like, don’t do that. They’re, they’re not asking you to do that. So typically we don’t bundle it. We all films that said, let me give you some scenarios where we do and some scenarios where we absolutely do not.
Um, we, one of our clients is a big credit union, okay? They are an outstanding client and we love them and they, but they do lots of video content of course cuz they’re a bank, you know, they’re a credit union and they have all kinds of things. They talk about mortgages and auto loans and HELOCs and all kind of things. And they also do an educational series. So what we do, we’ve been there, they’re folks for a couple years now. What we do at the beginning of the year is we’ll go over their whole budget and all the, all the individual items they want, but then what we’ll do is we will set a couple of days or a few days during the year where we will gather media for all the rest of the videos, interviews and B-roll. Okay? And they will pay for those days, they pay full price for our day rate, for B-roll and interview days.
Then we have all this media we can use for their videos for the rest of say the, that quarter or something. Well then, yeah, we bundle that because our level of effort has gone down. If we’re doing eight videos, I don’t have to do eight separate shoots. We do one or two days worth of shooting and we have enough for, so my level of effort goes down, therefore the cost per video should go down we bundle. That makes a lot of sense. Now another scenario is if you have a client who wants you to do five or six or seven videos throughout the year, but it requires five or six or seven different shoots, okay? In other words, the level of effort per video is exactly the same. It doesn’t go down because we’re doing five. It’s the same level of effort times five or whatever version of that is in your world.
That’s video for me. Well, in those situations, no, we don’t bundle because the labor is exactly the same for us. So the rule of thumb that we use is when the labor goes down for you, then consider bundling. If the labor does not go down per item, well then no, why would you do that? And certainly don’t preemptively offer it to your client. It undermines you and it makes your client, um, feel a little shaky about <laugh>. You, you think they’re gonna like you more, but it’s, it’s not the case. They want to trust and know that you know what you’re doing and that you are confident in your pricing and that you know what things cost because you’re that good. Focus on that. Those are my thoughts on bundling. I hope they help. I love you.