What is an Explainer Video?
An explainer video is a short-form video that usually serves the purpose of briefing the most vital information about a Company or a Product or Service. Explainer Video productions are being used as Marketing Tool for promotion, advertising, and sales highlighting a Company and its Product or Service, or Business Plan in the most efficient manner.
Many industries and companies host explainer videos on their landing pages or feature them on the homepage of their website. Most of the companies use explainer videos for advertising their products or service via social media tools like Facebook, Instagram, and other social media websites.
Explainer video production facilitate companies in creating awareness and feedbacks about the Company and its Product or Service. However, it is very important if you do not limit the length of the video length for the explainer video, you can lose the audience’s interaction with the target group, and eventually, you do not get the desired or targeted business outcomes.
What is an Ideal Explainer Video Length?
An explainer video should be long enough to communicate the most vital information and efficiently present the Company and its Product or Service; but at the same time, it must not be too lengthy with mind-numbing contents, thus losing the interest of the audience.
Let’s discuss and have a closer look to answer the question of how long a perfect explainer video should be for the amazing results.
It is proven so far that if a video is short and particular to the point, it gets much better attention and engagement of the viewer and it is easier to attract viewers to stay till the end of the video. However, if the video contents are too boring and lengthy then certainly it will be hard to get viewers’ attention completely.
It is vital to keep the balance according to the nature/type of the contents of the explainer video and the target audience. It is important to consider the steps to write explainer video script. The video should be short enough thus ensuring not to make the viewers bored and leave the screen or device before they get a call-to-action. However, you need to produce a video long enough to present all the essential info and pieces of evidence about your company, product, or service. Hence keeping the balance between video length and viewer’s engagement is crucial.
To understand how long an explainer video should be, the following aspects must be considered:
1) Who is the target audience of the explainer video?
2) Where to place or upload the explainer video – Is it on the Homepage, Blog, YouTube, or landing-page?
3) What action is desired from the target audience after completely watching the explainer video?
The last question is the most important one to determine the correct length of an explainer video for providing enough information to entail the desired action from the viewer.
No doubt that shorter videos are getting the attention of the viewers without any difficulty or extra effort. But the decisive question is how short? One, two, three, or more minutes, is the question that you must be interestedly looking to have an answer to.
First, you need to keep in mind what has worked for others may not certainly work for your business and might not be on the same norms and necessities as that of other businesses. Hence, the length of your video a shorter (or even a longer) duration video will be according to your business needs. Even a good video of an unsuitable time duration can fail to seek viewer attention and value addition of your invested dollars.
So, what is the perfect explainer video length? Is it a 30-second explainer video? 60-second explainer video? Or 90 seconds or more? As discussed above, perhaps, the answer would likely be “It is not one-size-fits-all”. Therefore, the ideal length of an explainer video depends on the uniqueness of your product or service and the target audience.
From the user’s experience, the ideal length of the explainer video should be 60 to 180 seconds on average. This time is quite reasonable to communicate to the audience all the important information. However, you need to see that is the video going to be spent directly from a website? Or from social media? Since Audience preferences vary by the internet platform.
According to some recent studies, the following are the average video watch time duration typically consumed by the Viewers according to the platforms:
- Instagram: 30 seconds
- Twitter: 45 seconds
- Facebook: 1 Minute
- YouTube: 2 Minutes
On the other side, a user looking for content on a company’s website will expect that content to be more wide-ranging and detailed. By considering how and where users will consume content, it is will be easier to measure a suitable length for the explainer video.
The intended message of the explainer video is also a very important factor to convince the customer in a short duration why their brand is the best option to resolve their problems? Hence according to the product or services offered, an explainer video should be configured to give a full overview and advantages for customer’s acceptances without losing attention.
CONCLUSION
Every explainer video needs its study to decide the right length to promote customer engagement in the best manner for amazing results; however, the bottom line is that shorter is better. Most of the time, explainer videos having a total time length of 180 seconds (3 minutes) or less succeeds in retaining viewers’ attention with enough time to tell the story.
The best technique is to judge the ideal video length is when creating an explainer video. You need to check an entire message be communicated in 90 seconds (2 minutes) or less to accomplishes the business needs or not. If yes, then you don’t need to spent efforts in making a full 180 second video. However, if you best judge that a full 180 seconds (3 minutes) video is essential to express and communicate effectively the product or service or solution then you should opt for full 180 seconds (3 minutes) video.
Author Bio
Daniyal Vadsaria is a professional digital marketer with years of experience in leading brands, working with multiple industry verticals. Currently, he is a Managing Partner of BuzzFlick, which is a specialized video animation service provider. Being a powerful industry voice, Daniyal also offers his services as a consultant in building and implementing brand growth strategies.