Since the internet took a giant leap from text-only to visual, movement and motion have been charging ahead. But it’s only in the last decade that video has been able to pull ahead and really shine.
We all like to learn new things. Absorbing knowledge is both fun and enjoyable. Or at least, it should be. Think about it, everyone loves a tidbit of information or a factoid or interesting trivia. But the learning process sometimes leaves much to be desired. A lot of this stems back to psychological markers and memories of school classrooms and tedious, seemingly irrelevant, lesson plans.
But as humans, we have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We always have. It’s the delivery method that doesn’t gel. In fact, when asked, how people most like to learn about a product or service, the results were provocatively pleasing. Not least for us, as it confirms what we’ve always known.
73% said they would prefer to watch a short video.
Which utterly decimates the competition, which is:
11% for reading text-based article, website or post
4% for viewing an infographic
3% for downloading an ebook or manual
3% for attending a webinar
3% for a sales call or demo
[Wyzowl]
When it comes to video, length and engagement are very much intertwined. You have to know what you’re saying and how long to say it for. Interestingly, in 2021, viewer engagement rose; meaning people were watching for a longer period of time. With diminishing attention spans, multi-screen distractions and doom-scrolling, this may feel counterintuitive but according to Vidyard there’s been a shift. See, across all video lengths, 54% of viewers will watch a video all the way through to the end. Fascinatingly, that’s actually up from 45% of viewers who did the same in 2020.
That being said, other trends are still present, and viewer engagement peaks during the first 10% of runtime. So whatever you’re saying has to be strong and direct. Because if you don’t grab them in the first 10%, you’ll lose ‘em.
On average, 62% of viewers stay engaged up until the end of a video.. providing that video is under 60 seconds in length. Another figure which has increased as this was 58% the previous year. Which is probably why 56% of all videos are under two minutes long.
Last year there were 244.4 million video viewers in the United States alone [business insider]. For an obtuse comparison, just to give an idea of scale, if every viewer was a mile travelled, that’d be the equivalent of a round trip to Mars and back. And while we’re talking immense numbers, just over half of the global population is on social media. 3.96 billion (with a ‘b’) people use social media [Digital Marketing], spending an average of 144 minutes per day on various networks [Statista]. It goes without saying that this is such a rich opportunity for brands and has been grasped hungrily with both hands. And social media platforms are more than aware of the value, with Facebook alone increasing their price per advert by 15% in 2022 [Zephoria].
So surely with these figures, it goes without saying, everyone must be investing in the best way to stand out on these platforms. And it’s true, they are. By funnelling mountains of cash into video. In fact, in 2021, high tech organisations created an average of 721 videos per company and 113% more user-generated videos than the previous year. The same study by Vidyard also concluded that:
Video creation increased by 178% in 2021.
50% of marketers are shifting budgets from traditional methods (such as TV) to digital video.
And video creation made up 35% of content for medium-sized business – compared to just 10% the prior year.
When you’re investing such a sizeable amount of your funding into video, you want to see a positive yield. Afterall, we all want to meet those KPIs and see strong ROI. Thankfully, Renderforest have the stats to reinforce this.
Using video saw 78% of brands gain more traffic to their website
Average time on websites increased for 83% of video marketers thanks to video
83% generated more leads with the help of video content
Video led to a 44% increase in sales
Due to these figures, 82% of B2B businesses use explainer videos, with 44% of businesses saying informative videos perform best. While 37% say entertaining videos perform best.
But we find real success is found in a combination of both informative and entertaining video animation explainers or video productions.
