How Long Should Your Marketing Video Be?
How long should your marketing video be? The answer is easy but not very useful: as long as it needs to be. While the goals of a marketing video are clear (present a brand or service in an attractive manner so that everyone knows who you are), the variety of video media available means that a marketing video for one client can have many different variations depending on the platform.
Conventional wisdom says a video for marketing should be two minutes or less.
That’s apparently the sweet spot of enough content to be substantial but short enough to realistically hold someone’s browsing attention long enough to get your message across. That metric sounds a little too easy given the fact that videos can appear in nearly any broadcast or internet location. It also ignores where in the campaign the video is appearing: is this during initial marketing? Where in the sales funnel does it fall? And given that search algorithms are constantly changing and mostly unknown, a hard number might fall out of date in the future. Five percent of all viewers will stop watching a video after one minute. That’s at least one good metric to keep in mind, even if you have more content than sixty seconds. So how long should a video be?
There are as many ideal lengths for a marketing video on social media as there are social media platforms.
Instagram videos should be around 30 second long maximum, even though the platform allows for a full minute. No matter what, front load your video with your key message right at the top. They have other channels within Instagram (such as IGTV and Instagram Live) that allow for longer messages, but for garden variety IG, keep it short and sweet. Youtube content should be two minutes or less. This is for a standard video posting. For their video ads or bumper ads, shoot for 20 and six seconds, respectively. In-feed Facebook videos should be 24 to 90 seconds long, again with any key message delivered at the beginning. Check out the video we produced for Novak Hair Studios. Designed for their Facebook page, it is 60 seconds of fun and includes text for the scrollers who don’t want to turn their sound on.
Clearly there’s no one size fits all solution, but there are some good general guidelines that apply to any marketing video, no matter where you have it.
Make it short.
Even if you have extra time available to you, your magic length is one minute. Although we said earlier that conventional wisdom says two minutes, you’re better off with one. So a one minute online video that’s trying for high conversions should get its information out in the first fifteen seconds or so.
Target audience is key.
If the video is less of a general introduction but more for specific product or service information, go for 60 to 180 seconds. You don’t want to skimp on content in this case and it’s probably safe to assume that this video isn’t the equivalent of a cold call. It may have even come up in a specific search.
When you’re dealing with something tricky like figuring out the optimal length for your marketing video(s), you don’t want to take a chance and wing it yourself. Work with an agency or expert that knows video and can give you the optimal product for what you want to do.
