How long should your corporate video be? A practical guide
It’s one of the most common questions in a first briefing conversation, and it’s also one of the questions that most reveals whether a production company is going to give you honest advice or just tell you what you want to hear.
The honest answer is: it depends on what your video needs to do and where it needs to do it. But there are some principles that hold consistently, and after twenty years of producing corporate films for organisations from law firms to airports to global retail brands, here’s our genuine guidance.
The research on corporate video length
The data on corporate video engagement is fairly consistent. Viewer drop-off begins almost immediately, on social media, around 20% of viewers will leave within the first ten seconds if the opening doesn’t engage them. By the two-minute mark, you will typically have lost around half your audience.
This doesn’t mean all corporate videos should be under two minutes, it means that every second of a corporate video needs to earn its place. A three-minute film where every scene is essential will retain more viewers to the end than a two-minute film padded with slow pans and generic music.
Length by purpose
Social media content: 30 to 90 seconds. For organic social content, shorter almost always performs better. The viewer hasn’t actively chosen to watch your video, they’ve encountered it while scrolling, and you have a matter of seconds to give them a reason to stay. Our Puffin Books Empathy Day promotional film was designed to work in a short social format, visually engaging from the first frame, with a clear message that lands well within a minute.
Homepage hero film: 60 to 90 seconds. A homepage brand film is the one place where a visitor has indicated genuine interest in your organisation, they’ve arrived at your site and chosen to watch. That earns you slightly more time than social content, but not much more. The film needs to establish who you are, why it matters and what you do within a minute to a minute and a half.
Employer brand and recruitment films: 2 to 4 minutes. Candidates actively considering a role are among the most motivated audiences a corporate video will ever have, they want to understand your culture and they’re prepared to invest time in finding out. Our Houzz employer brand film captured the culture of their London office for use in international recruitment, and at just over two minutes it had room to breathe and show real character.
Corporate documentary and brand films: 3 to 8 minutes. Films designed for events, conference presentations or longform website use, where the viewer has actively chosen to watch, can go deeper and longer. Our Velux Daylight Project brand film series and Lloyd’s Register Foundation educational series are examples of longer-form corporate content designed for audiences who want depth and detail.
Training and educational content: As long as it needs to be. Training videos are the one category where length should be driven entirely by the content. An unnecessarily short training video that leaves the viewer uncertain about what they need to do is a failure regardless of its engagement metrics.
The platform question
Length decisions should always be made in the context of where the film will be shown – and increasingly, the same film needs to work across multiple platforms simultaneously. A three-minute brand film might work brilliantly at a conference and barely at all on LinkedIn.
The most cost-efficient approach is to plan from the brief stage to produce a long-form hero version and shorter social cuts from the same shoot rather than returning to the footage after delivery and trying to cut a sixty-second version that wasn’t designed to be sixty seconds.
Get in touch → to talk through what the right length and format might be for your corporate film.