Everyone is posting video now. Is it still worth it for a local business?

If you scroll Instagram or Facebook for five minutes, it looks like every business in town is posting video. So you might wonder whether it's a must-have, or whether it's just one more thing to keep up with. We make video for a living, so we have a bias, and we'll tell you where the evidence is thin as well as where it's strong.

Nearly every business is already doing it

Wyzowl's 2026 State of Video Marketing survey found that 91% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool. That matches the highest level the survey has recorded. In other words, video is no longer something that makes you stand out. It's the baseline, and what matters now is how good yours is.

Fewer people say it's paying off

In the same survey, 82% of marketers said video has given them a good return on investment. That sounds high, but it's down from 93% the year before.

Wyzowl doesn't say why, so this part is our read, not theirs. When anyone can shoot and post a clip in a minute, the feed fills with video that looks the same, and the average clip gets easier to scroll past. That would explain why more video doesn't automatically mean better results. Whether you agree or not, the pattern points the same way: posting video is cheap, and posting video that works takes more thought.

What the data can't tell you

Two honest limits. First, the Wyzowl survey is small, 266 respondents, and the 82% is what marketers say they feel, not revenue measured against video spend. Second, we couldn't find a solid 2026 study that measures video results specifically for local businesses. Be skeptical of any agency, ours included, that quotes you a precise "video will increase your sales by X%" number for a business like yours.

What you can do is measure it for your own business, which is much more useful than any industry average. More on that below.

Where video earns its keep for a local business

This is our judgment from working with local businesses, not survey data. The videos that tend to work for service businesses, restaurants, clinics, and shops share a few traits:

• They show the real thing. Your actual crew, your actual space, a real before-and-after. Customers are choosing someone to trust with their home, their health, or their money, and seeing a real person helps.
• They answer one question. "What happens during a roof inspection?" "What does a first visit cost?" Short and specific beats a polished brand film with no point.
• They live where customers are already looking. On your Google Business Profile, at the top of your service pages, and in your ads, not just posted once on social and forgotten.
• They're clear and easy to watch. Good sound matters more than most people expect, and so does steady, well-lit footage. Phone video can be perfectly fine if it's done carefully.

Where it doesn't

• Random clips posted when you remember, with no link to a service or a booking.
• Trend-chasing content that gets views from people who will never hire you.
• Hard-to-hear or badly lit footage that makes a good business look careless.

How to find out if it's working for you

Treat your first batch of videos as a test. Pick two or three questions customers ask all the time and make a short video for each. Then put them where they can do their job: on the matching service page, in your Google profile, and in a small ad budget.

After a month or two, look at three things: did calls and form fills on those pages go up, did people watching the video go on to contact you, and which videos got the most replies or questions from real customers? To tell which ones are working, you'll need to know where your calls and leads come from. We explain how in Part of your ad budget is probably wasted.

If people watch and don't contact you, the problem may be the page around the video rather than the video itself. Our post on why your website traffic isn't turning into calls covers the usual causes.

Thinking about video for your business? See our video production service, or book a free consultation and we'll tell you honestly whether it makes sense for you right now.