How long should your promotional video be for your company? In this article, we discuss the topic in detail. In summary, it depends on the video’s purpose, e.g. the best length for a product overview video is usually 60-90s whereas for a paid video advert it’s 6-30s depending on placement details.
Factors to consider
The best duration for your video depends on the below factors:
- Video purpose: e.g. is it an advert or an educational video?
- Audience familiarity: videos to a cold audience should be shorter.
- Audience time availability: if the audience doesn’t have time to focus, then shorter is better.
- Broadcast specs: certain media like TV have specific requirements.
- Budget: long videos cost more to make than short videos.
What about product complexity? It’s less of a factor than you might think. That’s because regardless of complexity you need to be able to communicate your product’s value quickly to your audience. The image below summarizes the idea of video duration for different types of videos with more explanation in the text that follows.
Online adverts (paid promotion)
What’s the best duration for a video advert? In general, short 15s-30s videos are best. However, it depends on the exact type of advert and your targeting strategy. Different platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc all have slightly different available advertising formats and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed just looking at them! But generally, the requirements on the various platforms are:
- In-stream adverts (i.e. ads that play while you watching something else): 6-30s on most platforms, or longer if skippable.
- In-feed adverts (i.e. ads that appear in your feed): flexible including longer durations
- Out-stream or standalone (e.g. ads appearing on other websites): 15-30s
But our suggestion is to create a punchy 15s advert along with a 30s version. Then for the 30s version, you should get straight to the point in the first 5s – this means the advert can be more useful in skippable formats like YouTube in-stream adverts where the audience might only watch for a short time. If you can, create different versions with slightly different messaging to test against each other. Below is an example of a YouTube video advert we created for ourselves:
Product explainers
A product explainer video should be short and to the point. The ideal duration in terms of impact is 60s. There’s something magical about a concise video that fits into 60 seconds! However some creative approaches require a bit more time, and in those cases a 90s video is appropriate.
What about a 30s explainer video? Isn’t shorter always better? No, a 30s video is usually too short to create a compelling overview. While it can be tempting to try to reduce production costs by making a shorter video, we’ve been involved in a few 30s explainer video productions over the years and we don’t recommend it. The reason is the messaging doesn’t tend to work out and the video almost always ends up needing to be made longer anyway. Here’s an example of a product explainer below:
Company Overview Video
Similar to a product explainer, the ideal duration is 60-90s for a company overview video. Certainly no longer than 120s. The video should give a high-level overview of the company’s offering and the benefits to the client. You can see an example of this below:
Demo or platform walkthrough videos
These are more detailed videos aimed at a warmer audience that’s actively evaluating your product for purchase. The ideal length for a walkthrough video is 2-4 mins. The audience for these videos may be more technically oriented, or at least more willing to grant you more time, and they’ll want a bit more detail on the available functionality of your product to help them make a decision. For highly detailed tutorial-style videos, 5-10 mins may be suitable. Below is an example of a longer software demo video:
Case study videos
The best length for a case study video will depend on its intended use. If it’s used mainly for lead gen or content marketing then a 1-3 min video will be appropriate. If it’s a tool to be used late in the sales process, e.g. to convince someone in the same industry vertical, then a longer video in the 2-8 min range can be helpful, like the video below:
How-to or topic explainers
If you’re making a video for content marketing purposes, e.g. to get you ranked on Google or Youtube, then a good video duration is usually in the 2 min – 10 min range. The ideal duration for you will really be guided by your viewer’s requirements in terms of convenience vs completeness of information, so shorter or longer is also possible. Below is an example of a content video we created for ourselves:
How much does translating a video affect its duration?
It’s common for brands with global audiences to localize videos to target different geographic regions. A translated video’s duration will typically be 0% to 30% longer or shorter than the original video, depending on the language. For example, Spanish videos tend to be longer than the equivalent English videos. Sometimes it’s better to try to keep the translated video’s duration the same as the original to save costs. That’s because changes to duration mean that animation needs to be added or removed and that sound design needs to be worked on again (as SFX positions will move and music needs to be re-edited). And so if your video needs to stay the same duration a skilled translator needs to keep the video duration attached to each visual the same as the original. Here’s an example of a video we translated into Spanish:
Estimating your video’s duration
If you have a script, how can you estimate its duration? You can use a tool like our video script timer, which was created specifically for company promotional videos. You can also use a text-to-voice timer like that of Edge Studio, these are also reliable if you select the option for a slower voiceover read. That’s because explainer videos tend to require slightly slower reads and slight pauses are also sometimes introduced during animation which can add some duration. Regardless of the tool used, you should note that by its nature video production can be variable and you should expect a 0% to 15% deviation from your estimate.
Conclusion
The ideal duration for your video will depend on what’s most convenient for your audience. In general, you should use shorter videos for top-of-funnel activities (awareness, traffic gen) and longer videos the further you go down the funnel. Get in touch if you’d like to chat about ideas and see more examples.
