One video is a bet. A system is an investment.
Most return-on-investment claims in this industry are promises nobody can keep. This tool does something more honest: it compares the same budget spent two ways, a one-off flagship video versus a consistent content system, and lets the arithmetic speak. Adjust every number to your own reality.
Your numbers
Both strategies get exactly the same money. Strategy one spends a year of budget on a single flagship film. Strategy two spends it steadily, month after month.
The one-off path spends twelve months of this on one flagship film.
Attention spikes at launch, then fades. That decay is real for a single campaign.
A system publishes a hero film and short-form social videos each filming session, eight to ten in all, so it takes more shots at attention with the same money.
UK B2B median is 2.3 to 2.9% (Ruler Analytics); professional services run higher.
Typical B2B opportunity-to-customer sits around 22 to 30%.
Outcomes are shown only for the system path, because the system includes the capture infrastructure (the pages, follow-up and rhythm) that turns attention into enquiries. A single film with nothing around it earns attention, and the attention fades. That is not a flaw in the film. It is what happens when there is no system to catch it.
Training and internal video
The one video ROI that is genuinely simple to defend: hours of repeated explaining a video removes, valued at what those hours cost.
Be conservative. Onboarding and repeated demos add up faster than people expect.
A training film keeps working after year one, so the first-year figure understates the whole story. This is the one mode where a single video really can carry its own ROI, because the benefit does not depend on anyone else's buying decision.
Cost per finished film
No speculation at all, just division. Three ways to produce a year of content, and what each finished, publish-ready film actually costs.
Posting twice a week needs roughly 100 pieces; 48 assumes video is half of them.
Typical UK range for a commissioned short corporate film.
A capable videographer's salary, employment costs, kit and software.
A monthly system producing a hero film and short-form social videos each filming session, eight to ten in all, roughly 50 or more videos a year, planned and published for you.
How this is calculated, and where the numbers come from
One-off vs system. Both paths receive identical money. The one-off path spends twelve months of budget on a flagship film whose attention arrives in a launch spike and decays over roughly eight months (weights 40, 28, 15, 7, 4, 3, 2, 1%), repeating each year. The system path publishes monthly; each batch keeps roughly half its effectiveness each following month (a retention tail), and the audience baseline compounds gently at 1.5% a month, which is what consistent publishing does to a following. Attention converts through a staged funnel: views to site visits at 1%, visits to enquiries at your rate, enquiries to wins at your rate. The cautious and optimistic ends of the range are simply half and one-and-a-half times the expected case.
Benchmark sources. UK and B2B medians from Ruler Analytics conversion benchmark reports (visit-to-lead 2.3 to 2.9% median across 100M+ data points) and published funnel-stage studies (opportunity-to-customer typically 22 to 30%). Video effectiveness context from the Wyzowl annual survey (twelve years of data). Every default here is editable because your market is not a median.
Time saved is people multiplied by hours multiplied by hourly cost, against the production cost. Cost per film is division. Neither pretends to know your sales figures.
What this tool refuses to do: promise leads, promise customers, or attach revenue to a single video with nothing around it. If a calculator makes that promise, ask it how.
Keep these numbers
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