Why Video Works: The Statistics Every Business Owner Should See

11 February 2025

"You should be doing video" is the most repeated advice in marketing. Rarely does anyone show their working. Here it is.

The evidence

• Around nine in ten businesses now use video as a marketing tool, and a similar proportion of marketers say it delivers good return on investment, according to Wyzowl's long-running annual survey.
• Consumers keep asking for more: the same research consistently finds a large majority of people want more video from brands they like, and say a video has directly convinced them to buy a product or service.
• People remember what they watch. Widely cited research suggests viewers retain dramatically more of a message delivered by video than by text — because faces, voices and movement engage more of the brain at once.
• Video keeps people on your website longer, and pages that hold attention tend to rank better and convert better.

The catch nobody mentions

These statistics measure video that gets watched. A dull, salesy video inherits none of these benefits. The formats that reliably work for small firms are unglamorous: answer a real customer question to camera; show a job being done; let a happy customer talk. Sixty to ninety seconds, decent light, clear sound.

The numbers say the medium works. Whether yours does is a message problem, not a technology one.