Like a good elevator pitch, an effective explainer video should be short. But how short?
While you might only have 15 seconds in an elevator, you usually have a little more freedom when crafting your message for an online audience. So, how long should my explainer video be, you ask?
Well, here are 3 tips to help you find out.
1. Your video isn’t supposed to do everything.
Keep your focus to 2-3 key points and let your website or sales team do the rest. You don’t want to bombard your viewers with too much information, just enough to get their attention. If there are more topics or features you want to cover, you can always make another video.
2. Shorter is usually better.
Not only will a shorter video save time and money during production, it’s also more likely that your viewers will watch more of it.
Our friends at Wistia did some research and found that as a video’s length increases, there’s a dramatic drop in the percentage of the video that’s viewed.
According to the graph, roughly 70% of a 60 second video is viewed. You can also see that about 65% is viewed for a 2 minute video. That’s about a 5% difference in the average duration watched.
Now, that 5% may not seem like much, but that means that on average, a viewer is watching 42 seconds of a 60 second video, and 78 seconds of a 120 second video. So, the longer your video is, the more content your viewers are going to miss out on.
So, while you need to make sure your video is long enough to cover the essentials, you’ll want to be as brief as possible.
3. Get to the point
Since viewers tend to drop off toward the end of your video, you should try to introduce your company as soon as possible.
In our explainer video for BaseCase, we use the first 5 seconds to present a quick pitch for the company before we do anything else.
If we take another look at the graph above, we can see that if you create a 120 second video, it’s likely that your viewers will skip as much content (42 seconds) as they would have watched in a 60 second video. That’s a lot of content going to waste (not to mention the time and money you spent producing it!), and more often than not, it’s the important stuff- like your pitch and call-to-action.
If viewers are dropping off around 65-70% of the way into your video, shouldn’t you talk about your company early and often?
Conclusion
At Demo Duck, we think the best length for an explainer video is 60 seconds.
But in the end, it’s up to you to decide how long you want your video to be based on your audience, goals, and budget.
But wherever you land, hopefully you’ll find the video length sweet spot – the perfect crossover between content and viewer attention spans.
Additional Resources