The Video Strategy Shifts Worth Making Now, Based on Our Latest Research

After surveying nearly a thousand marketers for our State of Video Report, scrolling the hottest takes on LinkedIn, and talking with peers in real life, I got the sense that many of us feel like marketing in 2026 is a little unmoored. The rules that worked for the last decade don’t quite apply anymore, but the new ones are taking shape.

In our research, I found three clear shifts:

1. Demand shift: As Justine Moore of Andreessen Horowitz said in her post on agentic video, video has won. It’s what consumers want and every social platform has shifted to meet that demand.
2. Production shift: 80% of marketers now use AI. The most common uses for video include writing scripts, editing footage, and improving accessibility.
3. Team shift: More companies are hiring video professionals, and non-video marketers are picking up video creation responsibilities. As demand for video grows and production gets easier, video is moving in-house. The teams that learn to think video-first will be the most successful.

With those shifts in mind, here are three changes I think you should make to your video strategy this year.

1. Post your top-of-funnel videos on social media

The blog isn’t the center of the universe anymore. Neither is the homepage. 83% of companies now distribute videos on social, more than landing pages (65%), email (48%), or the blog (40%). Social isn’t a top-of-funnel (TOFU) channel anymore. For most teams, it is the TOFU channel.

That makes sense, since social videos are meant to earn attention. You’re reaching a bigger, less targeted audience that isn’t already in your orbit, which is exactly what TOFU content is designed to do.

LinkedIn in particular is worth prioritizing. Video usage on the platform jumped from 61% to 81% of marketers year over year (YoY). That’s the biggest platform shift we measured. And there’s a second-order benefit worth naming: Research from Semrush shows LinkedIn is the #2 cited domain across large language models. That means any educational content you post there doesn’t just reach your followers. It can also directly shape how AI explains your brand.

2. Use AI to speed up your video workflows

The AI conversation in video has cooled into something more useful: less hype, more workflow. The data backs that up.

62% of marketers either currently use AI in video production or plan to within the next year. Active adoption ticked down slightly (41% → 38%), which I read as teams consolidating around the tools that actually work rather than experimenting with every shiny new release.

Where the growth is loud is in the types of AI use. The fastest-growing category in the entire report is AI avatars, which jumped 56% year over year. But the biggest gains are spread across the board. Clips, generated visuals, and voice dubbing all saw significant growth. AI captions remain the most common use case, which makes sense given how many people watch videos without sound.

Here are a few ways to experiment with AI in your workflow:

• Dub your videos in multiple languages: If you have a global audience, dubbing is worth exploring. Adoption has jumped 29% this year, and the barrier to entry is lower than it’s ever been.
• Pull clips from long videos: AI clips work best when the source video is great. This is the part most teams skip. Cut-downs from a mediocre webinar are still mediocre. Spend the AI savings on better source material, not more cut-downs of weak material.
• Create scripts: Getting a blog post or a research report into a short video script can be incredibly difficult, but AI has made this process far easier.

AI is starting to make libraries of great video content the way blogs and help centers were the strategic asset of the 2010s. The teams winning the next five years are the ones building searchable, repurposable, AI-augmented video libraries today.

3. Bring more of your video production in-house

When we asked companies who made videos for them, this year’s data saw the largest jump in in-house production across the board, from team members with video experience to those without.

• In-house video and creative teams: 35.7% → 54.3% (+52% YoY)
• In-house individual contributors: 25.7% → 36.2% (+41%)

Every category grew, including agencies (+54%), so this isn’t a zero-sum migration away from outside help. It’s something more interesting: Video production is being absorbed into the operating model of the company.

Marketing teams are building in-house capacity, individual contributors are picking up cameras and editing software, freelancers are filling specialty gaps, and agencies are being used more selectively for premium or high-scale work.

The budget data tells a similar story. Nearly half of teams plan to increase video budgets this year, but that’s down from 57% the year before. A significant portion of marketers don’t even know their own video budget. The mandate is clear: Most teams need to do more with the same, and in-house production combined with AI is how that math works out.

The modern individual contributor in marketing is becoming a multimedia producer who writes, scripts, hosts, edits, ships to social, reads the analytics, and iterates. It’s a real shift in what the job requires, but you probably don’t need to hire for it. The best candidates might already be on your team. They just need the potential to be fluent across formats and a willingness to experiment.

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