Key Highlights
- Only 35% of teams use video for lead generation or prospecting.
- Just 28.2% of teams say they are very confident in their ability to connect video to business results, and 42.2% have no clear video KPI.
- Teams that publish a video in less than one day are 5 times more likely to report very strong performance than teams that take more than a week.
- Teams that consistently repurpose videos into multiple formats report very strong performance at 56.6%, compared with 9.8% for those that rarely do.
All figures in this article come from our 2026 video marketing study, based on responses from 688 marketing and communications professionals.
35% of teams use video for lead generation or prospecting. On paper, video is everywhere: 94% of teams create it. In practice, only 30% use it with lead generation as a goal, and 23.4% tie it to revenue or sales.
That gap is hard to ignore. Video adoption is high, but acquisition use cases are still limited. Measurement follows the same pattern: 79% of teams track engagement, 30% track leads generated, and 28% track revenue impact.
How Many Teams Actually Use Video to Generate Leads?
35% of teams use video for lead generation or prospecting, and 35% use it for sales conversations and demos. That puts it well behind the top use cases: social media (83%), internal communications (67%), and marketing campaigns (60%).
In the middle of the pack, employer branding accounts for 43%, while customer onboarding and tutorials come in at 36%. Video for acquisition sits near the bottom of the list, even though 75.6% of teams say their videos perform well.
The format works. What’s missing is the ability to connect it to pipeline and prove it.
Why Is Video ROI So Hard to Prove?
Only 28.2% of teams say they are very confident in their ability to link video to business outcomes. 48.1% are somewhat confident, 19.8% are not very confident, 3.9% are not confident at all, and 15.8% do not measure video performance consistently.
The barriers teams mention are all structural:
- data spread across too many tools: 47%
- multichannel impact is hard to track: 46%
- no clear KPIs: 42%
- metrics that do not reflect business value: 40%
None of these issues come down to creativity. The measurement framework simply was not built when the video program launched.
The report recommends three habits:
- one KPI for each goal promised to leadership
- one source of truth for the data
- one monthly report, even when the numbers are average
Speed.
Among teams that publish in less than one day, 51.6% report “very good” performance. At 1–3 days, that drops to 32.7%. At 4–7 days, 25.9%. More than a week, 9.8%.
Speed also drives confidence in ROI: 58.1% of teams that publish in less than one day say they are very confident, compared with 7.7% of teams that take more than a week. More cycles means more data, and more data means more proof.
The problem is that 59.5% of teams take more than 3 days to publish a video, and the most common answer is more than a week (34.2%). Only 9% publish in less than one day.
The bottleneck is clear: creation and editing account for 56.9% of total production time, more than three times the share spent on review and approvals (16.1%). And 63.7% of teams rely mostly or entirely on specialists, while only 9.9% say anyone can create videos independently.
The reasons videos never get made confirm the same issue: not enough resources (43.3%), production takes too long (37.8%), and too many approvals (37.5%). Budget only comes fourth, at 26.6%.
The result: 63.2% of teams sometimes or often miss opportunities tied to trends. This is exactly what brand templates help solve: specialists keep control of the framework, and the rest of the team can create without waiting.
How Do You Build a Video Presence That Drives Pipeline?
By combining a strategy that is actually followed with fast publishing:
- Teams with a documented, actively used strategy that publish in less than 3 days reach 55% “very good” performance.
- Teams with a strategy but slower publishing reach 44.7%.
- Fast teams without a strategy reach 17.2%.
- And only 29.8% of teams today follow a documented strategy, while 41.7% have no formal strategy at all.
The multiplier is repurposing. 56.6% of teams that consistently adapt one video into multiple formats report “very good” performance, compared with 9.8% of teams that rarely do. And 59% of teams only repurpose from time to time, or never.
Publishing every day does not mean producing every day. One video a week, adapted into multiple formats, is enough to build a daily presence: teams that publish every day report 59.6% “very good” performance, compared with 10.2% for teams publishing monthly.
In marketing, the dominant cadence is still weekly (37.9%) or monthly (38.8%), and only 10.7% publish daily. The shift happens at the brief stage: decide on the formats from the start, not after the fact.
Full Study: 688 Marketing and Communications Professionals Surveyed About Video Production
Get the full data, breakdowns, and action plan.
Read the full report Other insights from the 2026 study:
