Last year was a forgettable one all round, but an encouraging one for business videos. Not only did a majority of B2B marketers start off the year saying they were intending to use video as part of their marketing strategy, but by the end of the year close to half were reporting improved ROI from video. But what about engagement? The latest report [download page] from Vidyard looks at video completion rates for business-related videos, as well as other video benchmarks.
The average length of business-related videos increased from 4 minutes in 2019 to just over 6 minutes in 2020. That said, the majority (60%) of videos produced for business purposes (such as to support sales, marketing and communication efforts) are 2 minutes or less, with 37.3% being up to one minute long and another 23% being 1-2 minutes long.
Vidyard reports that with the cancellations of a majority of in-person events, videos over 20 minutes long saw an increase of 66% over 2019. It also pointed out that videos between 2 and 10 minutes have also increased, presumably “leaning on the trend of frictionless, self-service buying experiences to provide educational content to prospective customers upfront.”
Completion rates across all video types examined in the report averaged 42% — a decline from 52% in 2019. Not too surprisingly, shorter videos were more apt to be viewed to completion, as videos less than 60 seconds long had a completion rate of 58% in 2020. This is more than double the completion rate of the longest videos (more than 20 minutes, 24%).
Other Business Video Benchmarks
Beyond completion rates, the study offers other benchmarks for business-related videos on Vidyard’s platform in 2020. Some such results follow.
- Business-related video creation more than doubled (+139%) over 2019, with 60% of those videos being user-generated (up 128%).
- While the number of videos published by businesses varies, the most prolific industries include Retail and Consumer Goods (average of 248 videos) and High Tech, while Real Estate produced the fewest (46) in 2020.
- Companies with more than 5,000 employees published an average of 1,337 videos in 2020 (2.5x more than they published in 2019). This is far and above those published by companies with 201-600 employees, which published the next-largest average (557).
- The most popular business-related video types are product demos (63%), how-to’s (51%), explainers (51%) and webinars (51%), per earlier survey data cited in the report.
- When it comes to distributing video content, social media (73%), website (70%) and YouTube (60%) are the most used channels, according to the same survey data.
The full report can be found here.
About the Data: The information for this report was collected from anonymized video creation data from a sample of Vidyard customers, representing more than 760,000 videos. The data encompasses the time period of January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020.
