For many marketing teams, high production value is the limiting factor for getting started with media. Maybe it’s a millennial thing. We look at what we consume in our personal lives—the latest Netflix series, for example—and won’t be satisfied unless our content is just as good.

That was me a few months ago when starting AudiencePlus.

I wanted Netflix-quality production. An episodic series that felt like Chef’s Table for B2B content teams. So I reached out to a few agencies who I’d worked with in the past. Their quote? About $200k for six episodes.

There’s no way.

I can’t be the only one who’s had similar experiences. Many teams go down the same path, and when presented with similar quotes, decide to push off video or audio content down the line, waiting until they can unlock budget to produce the best. Meanwhile, they think: this owned media stuff sounds great. But we’ll stick with blog posts for now. Those are much cheaper to produce.

This dream of “Netflix quality” production isn’t making us better at producing content. It’s making us get in our own way. Here’s how you can adopt a different approach when you’re building—and scaling—a media strategy.

Authenticity > Production Value

It turns out Gen Z isn’t always blown away by production quality. One Gen Z survey said they ranked authenticity as their highest factor in choosing what to consume.

In other words, the people flooding the workforce now are the ones who grew up with web content on iPhones. TikTok. Instagram. Much of the media they consume fits on a screen the size of their hands. They don’t necessarily look for crystal-clear quality everywhere they go.

Your over-emphasis on production quality, in other words, can work against you if you’re focused on Gen Z. Consider:

• High-production quality often looks like a commercial. The audience feels like they’re being sold to. That’s a turn-off with immediate costs in attention and engagement.

• The “uncanny valley.” This is a concept that comes from improv. You look like good content, you sound like good content—but something is off. You don’t quite reach the level that feels authentic.

• Trying too hard. Let’s take an example from my own career. World, witness the worst piece of marketing I’ve ever produced. It was way too much budget and a misguided attempt at comedy. Downright painful to watch. Don’t be me.

Conversely, you can create extremely authentic content with little-to-no production budget. Let’s take a look at an admittedly extreme example: Monkeman317.

Monkeman is a stress-relieving squeezable toy designed to look like a monkey. Frankly, if you’d asked me, I’d tell you it was a stupid idea.

Yet the brand has accumulated almost two million TikTok followers.

Their strategy? Short videos where someone drops the monkey off of rooftops, stairwells, and other high places to watch it smash comedically on the floor. All videos look iPhone-filmed. They look like they cost roughly zero dollars to produce.

I know. It sounds ridiculous that this is “authentic” content. But this monkey is one of the best-selling products on TikTok—responsible for millions of dollars of sales.

What’s my point? Content that engages your audience does not have to have a high production budget. Let’s talk about how you can do this too (without dropping your brand mascot off any tall buildings).

Producing Authentic Content on a Budget

Changing your production principle from quality to authenticity is a good first step. It’s also intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be. It’s never been easier (or cheaper) to build content that looks good without triggering that “uncanny valley” response that’s so prevalent today.

Here are some ways to produce content that looks good enough without getting in your way.

Set up an internal or remote studio to capture content.

There’s no need to go crazy here. You can build an at-home or in-office studio for less than a thousand dollars. That content you see on Media House? That’s a Sony Alpha a6000 Mirrorless SLR Camera for $513 on Amazon and two Elgato Key Lights for $199 each. Add a few tripods and cables, and you can expect to pay about $1,000.

Professional? Yes. Cost-efficient enough to send a few of these kits to key executives? Even better.

If your company has office space ready to go, you can turn things up a notch. Build a studio for “newsroom-quality” production. Our studio at AudiencePlus can provide 8K video capture and full-fidelity audio recording for less than $25,000—far less than even one agency contract.

Best of all, this is a one-time expense. You own the equipment. You can use it to produce all sorts of content. And the more content you create, the better the lifetime value of your investment. In a future post, we’ll outline the equipment we use for our in-office studio.

Use emerging services to produce high-enough quality

It’s never been easier to create quality content from home or the office. For remote audio and video production content, consider using tools like:

• StreamYard

• Riverside.FM

• Zencast

For post-production work, these tools are great for bumpers, lower thirds, and the always-important captions and subtitles:

• Canva

• Descript

• PlayPlay

These tools can also help you prune your content down to bite-sized clips, which can be great assets to promote your content in rented channels like social media.

The takeaway? These tools aren’t super-expensive. They’re easy to use. And they can even make your most junior content marketers look like they’ve done work with professional media agencies. From there, the only thing preventing you from producing authentic content is your imagination.

A Time and Place for Netflix Quality

Hopefully, this de-mystifies the content production process for you. Yes, you want your owned media to look good. But if you’re investing too much time and money to focus on production quality rather than authenticity, you’re missing the point. Start learning what your audience wants by using a cheaper, faster way to start producing content you own. This is, I believe, one of the most efficient ways to grow and monetize an audience for B2B companies:

• Use affordable tools like those listed above to create production quality that’s good enough to start

• Figure out what your audience views as the most authentic content—and focus on that

You might say, “This is all fine, but we still want the quality of Chef’s Table.” Great. More power to you! For the right campaign, with the right purpose, and a justifiable budget, high-quality production can set the tone. It can deliver the message you want out there.

You just have to make sure that it is what you want. More importantly, is it what your audience wants?

Agencies fundamentally understand that their prices can be prohibitive to startups. They’re starting to get more flexible with their offerings to accommodate. And the recent rise of studios-as-a-service (think WeWork for audio/video production) are popping up across the globe. Use them. Use these providers to your advantage. Create content that both educates and inspires.

Just don’t let quality stop you from getting started.

Anthony Kennada | About the Author

Founder and CEO, AudiencePlus

Prior to founding AudiencePlus, Anthony served as the CMO of incredible companies like Hopin and Front. He was the founding CMO of Gainsight where he and his team are credited with creating the Customer Success category -- a novel business imperative, profession and software category that helps subscription companies grow sustainably by becoming customer obsessed. By focusing on human first community building, content marketing, live events and creative activations, they developed a new playbook for B2B marketing that built the Gainsight brand and fueled the company’s growth from $0 to $100M+ ARR, and eventual acquisition by Vista Equity at a $1.1B valuation. You can follow him here.