Video for content marketing used to be a sometimes thing. An occasional deviation from tried-and-true blog posts. But now, for many companies, video IS the new blogging.
New research from Vidyard called the “2017 Video in Business Benchmark Report” (free download) put math around this shift.
According to their survey, on average, businesses are creating 18 new videos per month. That is almost precisely the same cadence as a weekday blogging schedule.
Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot concurs, stating recently that he believes 50% of a company’s overall content marketing initiatives should be in video.
56% of business videos created in the past year were 2 minutes or shorter
This is the video equivalent of the scannable listicle and infographic trends that have been part of blogging for the past several years, and also a nod to the reality of the power of social media to change our collective perceptions of long vs. short.
53% of videos that are 90 seconds or less are watched to completion
This compares to just 10% of viewers watching all the way through for videos that are 30 minutes or longer.
Also similar to blogging is the fact that a handful of videos are responsible for most of the views.
The top 5% of videos get 77% of the views
What type of companies are using video most? Interestingly, the Vidyard study found an inverse bell curve. Small companies use video a lot (presumably to outflank larger competitors); and big companies use video a lot (presumably because they have ample in-house resources to do so).
Mid-sized companies lag behind on video content marketing adoption, at least for now.