The Real Cost of Not Using Video for Your Business

Many business owners decide not to bother with video. It feels like a sensible way to save money, because nothing is being spent.

But the cost of not using video for business is real. You just never see it on an invoice.

The cost shows up in other ways.

A customer visits your website, doesn’t quite understand what you offer, and leaves.

Someone picks a competitor because that competitor showed their work and you only described yours.

A member of your team explains the same thing to the same kind of customer for the hundredth time.

So the usual question, “How much will a video cost us?”, only tells half the story.

The other half is this: what is it costing you to keep selling and explaining your business without one?

That doesn’t mean every business needs to start a YouTube channel. It means that leaving video out completely can cost you customers, time and money, especially if people need to see what you do before they trust you with it.

People may never notice you in the first place

Having a better product or service doesn’t help if the right people never come across it.

Lots of people now find and compare businesses by watching.

They scroll through social media, search for how-to videos, or look for a quick clip that shows them what they’d be getting. If you have no video at all, you aren’t there when they do that.

Wyzowl, a company that makes explainer videos, surveys businesses and customers about video every year. In its 2026 survey, 91% of the businesses that took part said they use video in their marketing. Among the customers, 63% said a short video was their favourite way to learn about a product or service, compared with just 12% who preferred to read an article.

It’s worth being honest about those figures. It was a fairly small survey of 266 people, run by a company that sells video. It gives you a sense of direction, not hard proof that every customer wants video. But the direction is clear.

Picture two kitchen fitters working in the same town. Both have smart websites and good reviews. One of them also has a short video walking round a finished kitchen, showing the clever storage and how they dealt with an awkward corner.

That video tells a customer far more than the words “beautiful, bespoke kitchens” ever could. They can see the quality of the finish and imagine something similar in their own home.

The other fitter might be just as good. The difference is that the customer has to take their word for it. When people are choosing who to shortlist, that difference matters.

Customers have to work harder to understand what you sell

Some products and services are easy to explain in a sentence. Many aren’t.

If you sell booking software, a specialist piece of equipment or a service with several steps, customers have to piece together in their heads how it all works. The harder that is, the more likely they are to get it wrong or give up and go elsewhere.

In the same Wyzowl survey, 93% of businesses that use video said it had helped people understand their product or service better. That’s what the businesses believe, rather than something that was measured, but it fits with common sense.

Imagine a software company whose website says it will “make managing appointments easier”. That sounds good, but a customer still wants to know what happens when someone cancels, whether people get reminders, and what the receptionist actually sees on screen. A short screen recording can show all of that in under a minute.

It works the same way for other businesses. A shop can show how a folding desk opens. A manufacturer can show how a part is fitted. An accountant can explain what happens after you first get in touch.

Video works here because it lets people see how something is done, rather than imagine it.

There’s another benefit that people often miss. A clear video also helps the wrong customers realise you’re not right for them. That might sound like a bad thing, but it saves you from a sale that ends in a complaint or a refund.

Your claims go unproven

Almost every business says it’s experienced, friendly and reliable. Your competitors say the same things. Saying it doesn’t prove it.

Video lets people see the evidence for themselves. They can see the people doing the work, the care they take and the results they get.

Think about an accountancy firm. A well-written paragraph can say it understands small business owners. A two-minute video of one of its accountants explaining a common cash-flow mistake shows it. The viewer can judge whether the advice makes sense, and they get a feel for what it would be like to sit down with that person.

This matters most when people are choosing someone they’ll have to work with, such as a builder, a consultant or an agency. They’re not just buying a service. They’re deciding whether they trust you.

Video isn’t magic, though. Putting a face on camera doesn’t prove someone is good at their job, and a stiff, scripted testimonial can feel less believable than an honest written review.

Video works best when it shows something real that the viewer can judge for themselves.

Wyzowl found that 89% of the customers it asked said the quality of a video affects how much they trust a business.

That doesn’t mean you need an expensive production. Clear sound, a clear explanation and honest footage matter far more than fancy camera work.

Not having video leaves your best evidence hidden. A poor video can make that evidence look less convincing, so it’s worth getting it right.

You lose sales, and end up competing on price

Sometimes a customer believes your product is good and still doesn’t buy.

They might be unsure about the size, how easy it is to use, how long it takes to set up, or what happens if something goes wrong. Another line of sales copy won’t fix those doubts. Showing them often will.

A furniture shop can film a chair with a person sitting in it, instead of only showing it against a white background. An equipment supplier can show the setup from start to finish. A web designer can walk through a finished project and explain why each decision was made.

In Wyzowl’s survey, 85% of customers said a video had convinced them to buy something at some point. Separately, 83% of businesses using video said it had directly increased their sales. Neither figure means your sales will jump by 83%. They simply show that video regularly answers the questions that stop people from buying.

Video can also help you charge what you’re worth. Say a decorator charges more than others because they spend extra time on preparation. If customers can’t see that, they’ll compare quotes on price alone. If you show them the difference, a higher price starts to make sense.

Some people will always go for the cheapest quote. But without anything to show them, you’re asking customers to pay more for something they can’t see.

Your team keeps explaining the same basics

Explaining the same things over and over is a cost that most businesses never add up.

If every new customer asks the same questions, someone is spending time answering them. A video won’t replace a proper conversation, but it can cover the basics before the call, so the call itself is more useful.

Customers are increasingly happy to do their own research first. Research firm Gartner surveyed 646 business buyers in 2025, and 67% said they would prefer to buy without having to deal with a salesperson at all. That survey wasn’t about video, but it shows how much people want to find answers for themselves.

Here’s how the cost adds up. Say a business owner has eight introductory calls a week and spends ten minutes on each one explaining how they work. Over 48 working weeks, that’s 64 hours a year spent repeating the same explanation. If their time is worth £40 an hour, that’s £2,560 worth of time.

A short video explaining the process could save some of those hours. It won’t save all of them, and the time saved only has value if it goes into something useful, like doing paid work or having better conversations with serious customers. The more senior the person repeating themselves, the more that time is worth.

Customers cost more to look after once they’ve bought

Video keeps working after the sale too.

If a customer can’t work out how to set something up, they’ll ring you, put it off, or get frustrated. If they get a step wrong, you could end up with a problem that didn’t need to happen.

In Wyzowl’s survey, 57% of businesses using video said it had cut the number of support questions they received.

Let’s put a number on it. Say a business gets 60 calls or emails a month about the same setup task, and each one takes ten minutes to deal with. That’s ten hours a month. At £30 an hour, that’s £300 of staff time every month spent answering one question.

A clear how-to video could cut that down, but only if customers can find it when they need it. A video buried on a page nobody visits won’t help anyone.

It’s also worth being honest with yourself here. If customers keep getting confused because the product or the instructions are badly designed, fixing those might be a better answer than a video. For most practical tasks, the best approach is a short video people can watch once, plus a simple written checklist they can follow along with.

Your competitors build up proof while you start from scratch

One video rarely changes a business overnight. A collection of useful videos, built up over time, can.

A competitor who regularly films answers to customer questions, shows their work and shares customer stories ends up with a library of evidence. Their website answers more questions, their team has more to send to customers, and people thinking of buying from them have more ways to judge them.

Wistia, a video hosting company, studied more than 13 million videos on its platform for its 2026 research. It found that educational and how-to videos were among the most watched. It also found that almost 90% of teams reused their webinar recordings, and about a third of those recordings were still being watched three months later.

The lesson is that a good video doesn’t disappear after a day like a social media post. One recorded customer interview could become a full case study, a short clip that answers a common worry, and something to include when you send a quote.

That only works if the videos stay useful and up to date. An old video showing out-of-date prices or products can do more harm than good.

A famous example: Dollar Shave Club

In 2012, an American start-up called Dollar Shave Club launched with a funny, simple video explaining its razor subscription. According to its founder, Michael Dubin, speaking to Inc. magazine in 2017, the video was filmed in one day for $4,500. He said the company received 12,000 orders within 48 hours of it going online.

That was an exceptional result, and you shouldn’t expect your first video to go viral. The company’s later success also came down to its product, its timing and plenty of hard work, not one video.

The useful lesson is a simpler one. The video made the offer instantly easy to understand, and it gave the business a personality that a plain product page couldn’t. Most businesses don’t need millions of views. They need the right video in front of the right customers.

Working Out the Cost of Not Using Video for Business

There’s no single figure for the cost of not using video for business.

Imagine a service business that gets 2,000 visitors to its website each month. Two in every 100 visitors get in touch, which gives it 40 enquiries a month. It wins one in four of those, so it gets ten new customers a month.

Each customer spends £1,000. After paying for materials and the cost of doing the job, the business keeps £400 from each one.

Now say the business adds a good video to its main page, and the number of visitors who get in touch rises from two in 100 to two and a half in 100. That’s 50 enquiries a month instead of 40. Winning one in four, that’s an extra 2.5 customers a month, or 30 extra customers a year.

Those 30 customers would bring in an extra £30,000 a year, and the business would keep £12,000 of that.

Now take off the cost of the video. If it cost £3,000 to make and £250 a month to keep it up to date and promote it, that’s £6,000 in the first year. The business would still be £6,000 better off.

To break even, the business would need just 15 extra customers in the year. That means only five more enquiries a month, which is a rise from two in 100 visitors getting in touch to two and a quarter in 100. That’s a very small change.

It’s worth saying that £6,000 is a generous budget. Plenty of small businesses film on a phone and only pay someone to edit the footage, which brings the break-even point down a long way.

To be clear, these numbers are an example, not a promise. If a video brings in no extra customers, you’ve simply spent the money. And if it brings in the wrong kind of enquiries, it could make things worse. The point is that you can work out roughly what a video needs to achieve to pay for itself, and it’s often less than people expect.

When skipping video is the right call

Video isn’t always the answer. The best reason to make a video isn’t that everyone else is doing it. It’s that it solves a real problem for your business.

You might be better off spending your money elsewhere if your offer is already simple to understand, your customers prefer quick written answers, or not many people visit your website yet. If your prices, service or website have bigger problems, it makes sense to fix those first.

Video also has its own costs. It takes time to plan, film, edit, share and keep up to date. A product demo can go out of date as soon as the product changes. A beautiful brand film can look lovely and still fail to answer the one question that stops people buying.

Even the businesses that use video don’t always get it right. In Wyzowl’s survey, the number of businesses saying video gave them a good return fell from 93% in 2025 to 82% in 2026.

Only about a third of them actually measured that return in sales, rather than views or likes. Wistia also found that 57% of teams spent more time making videos than they spent getting people to watch them.

So if you do make a video, judge it on the things that matter to your business. Look at how many genuine enquiries you get, how many sales you make, how many support calls you take and how quickly new customers get started. Views alone don’t pay the bills.

The Real Cost of Not Using Video for Business

The real cost of not using video for business is the value of the problems it could have solved for you, minus what it would cost to make.

For some businesses, that won’t add up to much. For many others, it adds up to a lot. Customers understand what you offer more quickly, they can see proof of your work for themselves, and your team spends less time repeating the same explanations.

If you’re not sure where to start, our free Video Shot List Builder tells you exactly what to film for your type of business, shot by shot. You film it on your phone, and if you’d like it to look professional, we can edit it for you.