Why Businesses Should Still Be Using Long-Form Video

It should come as no real surprise that in 2025, and likely for the foreseeable future, short-form video content is all the rage with social medias such as Instagram and TikTok being hugely popular for organisations looking to promote their product or service. Whether it’s user-generated or professionally shot content, these are the platforms a lot of businesses are focussing on when it comes to marketing.

But does this spell the end for long-form production? Will we soon be turning our cameras sideways and shooting vertically more often than not?

When we use the term ‘long-form’, what we’re actually talking about is still relatively short. A longer video in this day and age could be as short as 2-minutes and usually never goes beyond the 5-minute mark. And whilst it’s true that attention spans are shorter than ever, you have to consider your audience when embarking on a video project - this should be the first thing you define before anything else as it is so critical. If your target market and sales typically come from social media, then you will want that short and snappy content as this is where viewers have the worst attention spans and can swipe onto the next post within a fraction of a second.

However, this isn’t going to be appropriate for all types of businesses, particularly those working in the B2B market.

Let’s take a consultancy firm for example - chances are, their ideal clients won’t be on TikTok. With these sorts of organisations they will benefit much more from a longer piece of film that gives detailed insights into who they are and what they do. An end product like this absolutely has a place on a company website, but we have found clients using them as part of tenders and direct proposals when pitching for work, not to mention in the charity sector our films have been used at events to aid fundraising efforts with huge success in the cases of Havens Hospices & Saint Francis Hospice.

Beyond selling, you may also want a longer piece of video to help you hire the right staff. We’ve spoken about this in a previous blog regarding how video is such a useful tool when giving potential new employees an insight into company life, but in order to provide value and truly reflect your culture then that film needs to be at the very least several minutes long. Again, it comes back to knowing your audience - someone who is weighing up their next career move will (and should) invest 3-5 minutes watching something that gives a look into that company.

The importance of knowing who the ideal end viewer is can’t be understated. If you go into a project anticipating the final result to be 5-minutes because we’re going to interview ten people, but once the first edit comes in you make a call that the length needs to be cut in half, then that means you could be sacrificing a lot of valuable information just for the sake of having a slightly shorter video. In these instances where duration really is a concern, it is better to create several shorter edits focussing on individual topics rather than trying to cram it all into one.

Any decent filmmaker will ensure that a video has good pacing and flows well, but that doesn’t mean making extreme cuts or removing natural pauses - you need to give the audience time to breathe and absorb information. If you throw everything out there all at once it can be hard to keep up with and if anything can be quite disorienting for the viewer.

For most businesses, so long as they have a website and some social media presence, I would always encourage them to explore both types of video. There will never be any harm in having a well put together promotional film on your website and if you are able to consistently post meaningful and engaging content to social media then you will have the perfect blend.