Video is becoming an increasingly important part of the B2B marketing mix. In part, this is because videos are a highly effective way to tell stories in a limited amount of time. If you think about most people’s attention spans, it’s rather naïve to think that people are going to give you – a B2B brand – any more than a few minutes of their time.
Which leads, inevitably, to the following question: How can you optimize video for your B2B marketing campaign?
The first thing you want to do is to limit the length of that video. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that the optimal length of an online video was 2 minutes or less (about the length of an average YouTube video). New data from Vidyard, though, suggests that the optimal length is closer to 90 seconds.
What Vidyard did was to examine 250,000 videos from 500 B2B marketers over a 1-month period. It turns out that there was a direct relationship between length and retention rates: While a 90-second video retained 53% of all viewers, the retention rate declined precipitously the longer the video became. Overall, the retention rate was just 37% for all videos. And considering that 56% of the videos being reviewed were less than 2 minutes long, that gives you an idea of just how steep that fall-off becomes.
The second thing you want to do is to cram as much of the “good stuff” into the first 10 seconds as you can. That’s because most people will stop watching a video after the first 10% has been viewed. So, for a 90-second video, that’s the first 9 seconds! Yes, that’s right, even if a viewer knows that he or she only needs to commit to 90 seconds of continuous attention, you’ll still lose half of them in just the first few seconds.
In many ways, this requires a rethinking of the storytelling arc. Remember back in grade school when you were taught about the narrative arc, and how you should steadily build toward a final conclusion? Well, you can forget about that approach working in the B2B marketing world. People aren’t waiting until the very end to hear the conclusion.
Finally, you need to think about the difference between desktop and mobile video. In the Vidyard study, there was still a very defined gap between people watching B2B marketing videos on desktop (86%) and those watching videos on mobile (14%). But it’s clear that this trend is going to quickly shift in favor of mobile. People just consume prodigious amounts of video on their smartphones and tablets, and there’s no reason why this trend isn’t going to upend the B2B marketing world as well.
And, in terms of when people are most likely to watch the videos, it looks like the middle of the week is optimal. Video consumption tends to rise toward Wednesday and then fall off for the rest of the week. So if you’re counting on a lot of video views, it’s best to plan a new video launch for the middle of the week.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.