Video Outperforms Every Other Content Format for Manufacturers. Most UK SMEs Still Aren't Making It

Video is the best-performing content format in manufacturing marketing, according to the people who make it. Not case studies. Not white papers. Not the thought-leadership pieces many technical SMEs assume carry the most weight. Video, and by a wide margin.

The Content Marketing Institute's most recent manufacturing benchmark study surveyed 104 manufacturing marketers as part of a wider group of 1,186 B2B respondents, fielded between June and August 2024 and published that November. Eighty-five per cent had used video in the previous twelve months, the second most common format after short articles at 89%. Asked which format actually produced results, though, video came out clearly on top: 74% named it their best performer, ahead of case studies at 45% and e-books at 43%.

That preference is starting to show up in budgets. Sixty-two per cent of the manufacturers CMI surveyed planned to increase video spend in 2025, the single largest planned increase of any format, ahead of thought-leadership content at 50%. In-person events, still central to a lot of industrial sales, were used by 71% of respondents and were named the most effective distribution channel by 51%, with blogs and webinars close behind at 49%.

Set that against how the video actually gets made. Wyzowl's most recent State of Video Marketing survey, running through 2025 with 266 marketing professionals, found 91% of businesses now use video somewhere in their marketing. Only 59% produce it entirely in-house, though, with a further 32% mixing internal effort and outside help. Among the businesses that still avoid video altogether, the reasons given were mundane rather than strategic: cost (24%), a belief they don't need it (24%), time (19%), unclear return (10%) and simply not knowing how (10%).

None of those barriers are specific to manufacturing, but they land harder on a technical SME with one marketing person, or none at all, than on a company with a dedicated content team. Forty-six per cent of the businesses Wyzowl surveyed put a third or less of their marketing budget toward video. Seventeen per cent admitted they weren't tracking video spend at all, which says something about how ad hoc the whole activity still is for most companies, manufacturers included.

For an engineering or manufacturing SME, the CMI figures point somewhere practical. The highest-rated content format doesn't call for a film crew. A lot of it can come from things already happening on site: a customer walking through how a part performs in use, a two-minute clip of a process that's genuinely hard to explain in writing, a recorded answer to the question every prospect asks on a first call. That in-person-events figure is worth sitting with too. If 71% of manufacturers are already turning up to trade shows and site visits, most of them are also sitting on unused footage from events they've already paid to attend.

We've written before about the sales assets most technical SME websites are still missing, the case studies, comparison sheets and other material that actually helps a buyer justify a decision internally. Video sits alongside that gap rather than filling it. CMI's own numbers put case studies a distant second to video for producing results, 45% against 74%, which suggests the two formats are doing different jobs rather than competing for the same one.

The gap between what performs and what gets made isn't really a technology problem. It's a habit and a resourcing problem, and for a small technical marketing team the realistic fix looks less like commissioning a campaign and more like making one short, unpolished video a month and building from there. The manufacturers already doing this aren't necessarily better resourced than the ones who aren't. They've simply started.