By Sarah Jenkins · 5 min read
Marketing teams often struggle to prove the value of video. Here is the framework to calculate exactly what your videos are worth.
You’ve spent $50,000 on production for a product launch video. You’ve hosted it on your site and shared it on social. But when you ask your CEO, "Did that video make money?" they look at you blankly.
Video is the most engaging medium on the internet, but it’s also one of the hardest to measure. Unlike a banner ad where a click is a click, video requires a holistic view of the funnel.
At Vidly, we’ve helped teams across manufacturing, SaaS, and retail calculate ROI by breaking video performance into three distinct buckets: cost reduction, revenue contribution, and productivity gain.
To get a true picture, you have to look beyond just views. Here is how to quantify the impact of your video strategy.
Calculate the time saved by removing the need for live demos, meetings, and manual training sessions. If a video replaces a 1-hour meeting, you’ve saved the cost of that hour.
Track how video assets drive sales. Is it product explainer videos that lower friction in the checkout process? Are webinars acting as nurture sequences that close deals?
Measure the efficiency of internal comms. How much faster does your team onboard when using video instead of PDFs? How much time is saved in meetings when action items are auto-generated?
Let’s look at a hypothetical internal training scenario for a mid-sized sales team.
"Before Vidly, our weekly sales sync took 45 minutes. We spent 3 hours rewatching the recording to find the one metric mentioned at the end."
The Hidden Cost: 3.75 hours per week × 4 weeks × $75/hour (average sales rep salary) = $1,125/month.
By using Vidly to auto-generate a meeting workflow and transcription, the team reduces that time to 5 minutes. That's a monthly saving of $1,050.
Over a year, that is $12,600 in recovered productivity. Now, that is a number the CFO can understand.
Video creates a searchable knowledge base. If an employee leaves, the institutional knowledge isn't lost to the ether. Onboarding new hires drops from weeks to days.
With AI tagging, finding a specific moment in a 2-hour recording takes seconds, not 20 minutes of scrubbing. This reduces frustration and speeds up decision-making.
Automated transcription ensures no critical compliance details are missed in legal or HR meetings. In regulated industries, this risk avoidance is worth millions.
Run the math on your specific video assets. Our spreadsheet template walks you through the cost reduction, productivity, and revenue formulas.
ROI isn't just a buzzword; it's the only way to justify budget in 2024. The problem is that calculating it is usually a manual, spreadsheet-heavy nightmare. But it doesn't have to be.
With Vidly, you get a dashboard that automatically tracks engagement, transcription accuracy, and workflow generation. You can see exactly how much time your team saves every week without lifting a finger. Turn every video into a workflow, and every workflow into a measurable return.
