How long should product demo videos be?

Takeaways

• For routine feature releases you'd share on social media, aim for 30-60 seconds.

• If you have a bundled seasonal release or introductory product overview, go for 2 minutes or less. TV advertisements are a good benchmark for duration and pacing.

• If you absolutely must have a complete in-depth tour, keep it under 10 minutes and consider breaking into separate segments. Mixpanel's product demo does this well.

• Comprehensive updates will lose audience attention, especially if they are hard to casually flip through. About half of people will finish videos under 10 minutes long, according to Vidyard's benchmark report.

• Demo videos are a starting point. If folks want more details, you can redirect them to follow up content. Content that's interesting will inspire curiosity to learn more, and that isn't a sign your original video was incomplete.

What makes a good demo video?

Demo videos have a nasty habit of getting complicated quickly. Before you know it, you're three pages deep into a niche admin settings page explaining how a permissions toggle works. The goal of a demo video is to show people enough, but not all. It is to introduce a new idea, raise awareness, and then move folks into whatever comes next — a sales call, trial, or set up guide.

When demos start to feel bloated, it's often because these responsibilities get mixed together. Or we record "one demo to rule them all" in the hopes that the more of our product customers see, the more interested they will become. In reality, overloading a demo video doesn't communicate as well as a concise and clear clip.

Why are short videos better for showing features?

Think of product demos like a playlist of mini-story arcs, instead of a single unbroken recording. A good product demo is a series of smaller parts which can be easily swapped out or updated in the future. You do not need to record it all at once. A modular approach to video also makes audience-specific revisions much simpler to manage, because you’re reusing most of the content between video variants.

If your product release feels too complicated to cover in that amount of time, pick 2-3 highlights and lead with those. You can set up a separate webinar or follow up session to answer questions or dive deeper into the mechanics behind the feature.

An example from a recent Framer release, covering a handful of updates in about 2 minutes:

An example of quick product overview: Superset

Skip intros and backstory

Assume your audience has a basic understanding of your product. You will burn time if every single update has a lengthy introduction and background for the product/company vision. One way to check this? How would you change your recording if the audience saw every update you published already? Old content is still available, and better to link than clutter the latest news by repeating yourself.

If you need to go into more details, find time at the end or in a follow up video people can find after completing the first clip.

If you’re recording a demo for people unfamiliar with your product, record the 2-3 workflows that most of your existing customers find valuable. Talk about the use cases most likely to impact a new customer. These are the features that are most important to communicate to newcomers. From there you can move people into a live guide demo or trial. A demo video isn’t meant to make product experts.

Break into shorter clips to make changes easy

You do not need to record a 20-30 minute webinar for each release. This makes your product feel complicated. And people have to set aside time for video that long. You want a length that someone can absorb while waiting for the bus or for a meeting to start. They see and watch in one session, instead of bookmarking your video to come back later when they have the time to focus. When you include too many instructions, it signals to people they need to block time to get it done.

Share the basics, not a complete setup guide

The goal is awareness, not a complete guide for getting started. Your job is to share what it is, how it works (high level) and then where to go if you need more info. Skip any kind of troubleshooting or caveats that will only apply to a small part of your audience. It’s OK to avoid details in product announcements.

The goal is to show people how it works, without trying to record a full guide of “How every customer should use this…”. You can include best practices and troubleshooting details in documentation or follow up material for existing customers.

Show the happy path, it’s shorter.

In UX and design, a product’s happy path is what happens when everything goes right. It represents the ideal way for a feature to work. When you demo a feature, this should be what you’re showing by default.

The demo should be representative but doesn’t have to match the experience. Some details are better to truncate than try to represent in a demo for clarity. For example, don’t make people watch you fill out an entire form in real-time. 1-2 fields max, unless there’s something special with input that you need to showcase. Otherwise just skip ahead to when the form is filled out and then go from there.

Segment advanced workflows by smaller pieces, especially if they move between screens in the app. You can present each of the clips individually, or as part of a collection (playlist) depending on the audience and forum.

Short clips work best on social media

Shorter videos work better on social media, like X/Twitter threads or Instagram. You can also thread multiple short videos together, which makes it easier for people to call out and reshare the part they care most about. More specific and modular clips are easier to share and give you a feedback loop by seeing exactly which part folks care about. Long videos make it harder to understand if drop off is due to interest or just attention span.

Example mini feature video from Notion's X account.

The reason we favor shorter clips and iterative edits is simple – it’s the fastest way to act on what you learn. If you over-invest in the production and scripting of a complete end-to-end demo, it’s overwhelming to go back and edit it. Worse, you might have a higher threshold to edit something unless truly outdated or broken, just because of the work involved.

Next time you have to record a video showing your product in action, try lightweight mini-presentation loops. Short demo videos of new features and products will make your message simpler to create, share, and understand.

Need a better way to record your product demo videos? Rally helps go-to-market teams showing off their product through mini-presentations and easy-to-update videos. Give it a try for free and record your next product video.