Long form vs short form video marketing: which one should you choose?

If you’ve ever found yourself lost in a sea of cat videos, DIY tutorials, or epic travel vlogs, you know that videos can captivate in mere seconds and keep us hooked for hours. 

But it’s not all about the entertainment! 

Video can be a powerful marketing tool, helping capture the attention of your potential customers, keep them engaged, build trust and generate leads. In fact, video marketing can help increase brand awareness by 54%, and lead to 66% more qualified leads. 

But the question is: should you go short and sweet or long and detailed for your video?

That’s right. There is more than one type of video, and knowing which one is right for you can be the difference between your business growing or not. 

Long-form videos provide an opportunity for in-depth storytelling and can establish your brand as an authority in the field. On the other hand, short-form videos offer quick and engaging content that is easily digestible and shareable. 

So, let’s dive into the epic showdown between long-form and short-form video marketing to help you decide which is the best fit for your brand.

Ps. Keep reading to find out why it might not be as simple as choosing one or the other, and what you should do instead. 

What are your goals for video marketing?

Before deciding whether video media is right for you, you must first determine what you are trying to achieve in your business. 

Knowing what you want from video (and what your business goals are in general), will help you figure out which one is right for you. 

“I want to make more sales”

Yes! We know that 99% of the time, people are looking at the video or any marketing endeavour as a way to drive more revenue. But you need to get more granular with your goals.

Are you trying to grow an email list, convert leads, build brand awareness, retain customers or something else?

Start here, and then you can figure out which platforms, lengths, and frequencies will help you reach these goals, as they offer different things. 

Read more: What content do you need to create to hit your business goals

What is Short-form video marketing?

Short-form videos are like a shot of espresso—quick, powerful, and perfect for a fast-paced audience. They are typically 15-60 seconds long, although some platforms may extend this up to 2-3 minutes. 

Think of the snappy TikToks that get you dancing in your living room, the Instagram Reels that make you laugh out loud, or those 30-second YouTube Shorts that make you curious enough to click. 

TikTok was built around short-form videos, while other platforms (Instagram, YouTube, and even LinkedIn) have adapted and incorporated them due to their popularity. 

The content is usually focused and to the point, often delivering a single idea, message or piece of information – designed to be easily consumable and shareable, encouraging high engagement through likes, comments, shares, and views.

They are highly visual and often include text overlays, music, sound effects, and quick edits to maintain viewer interest.

When it comes to business, you might be familiar with TikToks and Reels that break out a single idea from a longer-form piece of content like a podcast or YouTube video. This helps make the content more easily digestible and creates buzz and awareness around the longer content. 

So. when should you use them?

Pros of short-form videos

Short-form videos are undoubtedly attention-grabbing, which is why they are great for social media. They help you build a following and get seen everywhere. 

One of the biggest benefits of short-form videos is that videos under 90 seconds keep 50% of viewers watching—much longer than long-form videos—so they have a much higher engagement and watch rate. 

Because they are shorter, they are usually quicker and easier to produce—although even short videos can take deceivingly long to develop concepts, record, and edit. 

Finally, short videos can cover a single topic in multiple ways, and they’re more likely to go viral if they’re quick and catchy. 

Read more: How much does B2B short-form video cost

Cons of short-form videos

Of course, the pros don’t mean they are always the best option…

The lifetime of your content on social media is surprisingly low, and the volume of content is high, which means that you’ve got a tiny window of time for people to actually see your content. 

Although this differs from platform to platform, you generally have to produce a lot of content to get seen and have a strong hook to capture their attention quickly. If you don’t instantly grab their attention, they’ll just scroll to the next video, and you’ll lose them forever. 

Although the shortness helps capture and keep attention, it can be harder to script as there is often so much to say. And it can be harder to explain more complex topics, so you have to be able to distil ideas down into bitesize chunks. 

What is Long-form video marketing 

On the other hand, long-form videos are like a cozy movie night—rich, engaging, and perfect for an audience willing to invest time in your story. 

These videos allow you to dive deeper, offering comprehensive insights, detailed tutorials, or captivating narratives. 

They can range from several minutes to several hours in duration and are designed to provide in-depth coverage of a subject. Long-form videos are commonly found on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.

Pros of short-form videos

It takes time to build a great relationship, potential customers aren’t going to trust you overnight, and that’s where longer-form video comes into play. If your viewers stick around it can build a stronger, long-term connection, and you have more time to showcase your expertise and authority. 

And while many people say SEO is dead, it’s still essential to help you get found on search. Longer videos have the opportunity to include more relevant keywords and phrases, and this can help enhance SEO performance. 

All this is great for facilitating more leads and sales, which is really the reason you are doing this. And with platforms liek YouTube you can even use ads and sponsorship for monetisation to increase revenue streams. 

Cons of short-form videos

Sadly, building an audience with long-form video is less likely to be viral or quick – it’s going to take time to grow your audience. 

Plus the actual time it takes to create the videos will also be more intensive, as they’ll take longer to plan, film and edit, and they can take more effort if you are reading off a script (which you might have to for complex messages). 

So, while the payoff might be great, the time and effort required for a long-form video are also more. 

Which one is right for your business?

Figuring out which one is right for your business goes back to the goals you set at the beginning. 

Looking to build awareness? Short-form videos that are easily digestible and shareable might be the best option for you. 

Want to get more leads and sales? Long-form, trust-building, authority-demonstrating videos might work better.

But does it have to be one or the other?

Combining short-form and long-form marketing in your strategy 

You might decide to do both! You don’t need to choose one or the other if you have the capacity and budget to do both. 

In fact, if you are creating content, the best strategy might be to repurpose it into multiple pieces of short and long-form content so that you can reach as many people as possible and hit multiple goals.

For example, if you record a podcast, you can create long-form YouTube videos as well as multiple short videos that can be shared across TikToks, Reels, Shorts and LinkedIn. This allows people to consume all the long-form content if they wish, whilst also giving you the highest chance of reaching new people with multiple, single-point, shorter videos. 

What works best for our clients?

Combining both long form and short form works best for our clients.

But more importantly, we’ve found that ‘purposeful videos’ work better than repurposed ones. I.e., when we purposefully record short-form video (we can record up to 50 in a day) and purposeful long-form video (we can record 10-15 in a day).

Want to outsource your video marketing for amazing results?

While the majority of marketers and business owners know that video is going to be a huge benefit to their business, there are a few things stopping them from getting started. 

Lack of time remains the number one barrier to video adoption, as well as confusion around how to start – and that’s where we come in.

We recently grew Daniel Priestley’s agency Dent’s channel from 35k views in one year to 1,033,852 views in one year – over a 2853% increase. 

Find out more about our short-from video service, and how we can help you create months’ worth of video content that will help transform your business with minimal effort from you.