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How Rev’s Video Marketing Manager Uses Rev Captions & Transcripts

How Rev Uses Rev

RevBlogCaptionsHow Rev’s Video Marketing Manager Uses Rev Captions & Transcripts

We speak a lot on how Rev’s products can benefit different industries and departments but what we don’t always address is how often we use it company-wide! So, we thought it would be fun to take it internally and discuss how Rev’s employees use our own offerings to improve engagement, workflow process and efficiency, and campaign performance. 

In today’s post, we interview Austin Canary, Rev’s Senior Video & Content Marketing Manager. He tells us how he uses Rev captions and transcripts in his video production process. Here’s the interview: 

ClaireLet’s start off with the basics. What is your position at Rev and how has it evolved over time?

Austin: I am the Senior Video and Content Marketing Manager at Rev.com. I first started in 2019 as a content marketing specialist to help with the blog content production, but I quickly expressed my interest in helping grow the video marketing that we did here at Rev. And so evolved into doing in-house production and that’s how we got to be here today. Now we’re making videos in-house and we’re working with production teams and freelancers to grow our video marketing program.

Claire: Super cool. What have been some of the golden moments you’ve experienced while working with the marketing team?

Austin: Funny enough, I think one of my golden moments here at Rev was actually heading up our Golden Moments tool for video editors. For some context, before I worked at Rev, I was a Rev customer. I conducted a lot of interviews with customers at my previous company, and I needed to be able to quickly find the soundbites I wanted to use in the final edited video. And it was a great workflow, but there was no connection between my Rev transcript and my video editing software.

Austin: For our internal hackathons, I proposed we develop a really simple export from our transcripts that would quickly create a chopped up assembly sequence and video editing software. So it would save a ton of time, from finding all the clips in the video footage, alongside using a highlighted Rev transcript. It ended up actually being picked up as a feature that we would put into beta in our transcript editor.

Austin: And once that went live, I worked with our Demand Gen team to produce a campaign for post-production teams and editors to promote the cool feature and they could opt-in for it. And we made several videos, blogs, and I even got to host a webinar with two really cool video producers in the industry. And it’s since been a really cool feature for sales to include in their conversations and customers are still opting in for it to this day.

Austin: I think that was a really cool moment for me, because it was a personal want and desire for our product. And I got to work with the product team. I got to work with marketing and sales and it became its own little hidden beta feature that we offer.

ClaireDo you use that on your day to day here, making videos?

AustinI do. You’ll experience it more now that you’re into customer testimonials, because basically I’ll be like, hey, while you’re going through the transcript and highlighting all the parts that you want to use, send me this little file that you can export from it and I’ll use that and I’ll quickly have all those moments in my video timeline.

Austin:It’s pretty cool. I mean, it’s a process that you think shouldn’t exist, but it’s nice that it’ll save that time between the two because otherwise, you just have to go back and forth. Like, I have to look at the transcript and then go find the clip, but now it just does it for me.

Claire:Okay, amazing. Working for such a fast growing company has its challenges, which isn’t unlike a lot of Rev customers who are looking for a solution that will help them grow. Can you talk a little bit about what Rev products you use, how you utilize them and the impact you’ve seen it make within your own role?

Austin: Right. As a creator in video marketing for the team, I am using all of our products for the most part. I would say primarily, captions. Captions are a standard for every video that we put out because at Rev, we understand not only that we need to make every video accessible with English closed captions as the baseline, but we also know that having closed captions will increase SEO for any videos we put out there, whether it be through the YouTube or Google algorithms.

Austin: If you’re searching for keywords and those pop up in our caption files, we’re more likely to rank for what people are searching for. When it comes to growth, I think captions should become an everyday practice for video marketers and video producers for those reasons alone. And especially, if you’re getting content pushed out to other platforms or streaming services for that matter. I think it always looks like a really professional touch, if you already have your close captions ready to go when you hand off your files to those platforms.

Austin: Yeah. I think on another video production side note, I think transcripts internally help you save a lot of time and allow you to grow and work on more projects, especially if you’re working in unscripted content. If you’re on a marketing team and you’re creating a lot of interview based content, that’s a lot of footage to go through. And having someone else type out everything that was said, so that you can quickly command F and find what you’re looking for, saves a ton of time, and I think it’ll help your video marketing team grow.

Claire: Okay. Very cool. So I have a question. Have you ever had to write your own captions for videos before?

Austin: During college, I used to intern for a church and a video production company and neither of them used services like Rev because there just honestly wasn’t the budget for it. And so a lot of video content that I would help them produce, if they did need captions, especially for people in the congregation or viewership that were deaf or hard of hearing and needed that for promotional videos and things, we especially did it.

Austin: Honestly, I would take the automated caption that was generated and then I would have to go through and edit. And a lot of times, that was very heavy lifting and I think had I known at the time, how justifiable it is to pay $1.25 a minute to have someone else do that for you, I totally would’ve done that instead or just paid it out my own pocket, so I could’ve done something else.

Claire: Yeah. How much time do you think you save by getting that process automated now?

Austin: Yeah. Captions alone, I would say it’s an hour for every one minute of video. Because I think if I were to either hand write it myself or have auto captions be the baseline and then I correct off of that, it would easily take me probably an hour, a minute at a normal pace to probably fix everything up and all that.

Austin: Some pain points for other video editors and video marketers like myself, is that I’ve seen, they have a desire to bring in more people from the outside to have a say on what goes in the final cut. Because I think we’re moving more and more into a collaborative workflow when it comes to video. It’s not just one guy in a dark room, deciding what the entire narrative is for a video.

Austin: I know for me personally, I love pulling in other writers and content producers and content managers who are also working on their own content that will go along with my video and they’ll have, likely, better skills when it comes to reading faster than me or knowing which quotes sound the best for the content objective that we’re going for.

Austin: A lot of times, video producers like myself, like to pull in either the client that they’re working for or another producer on the team and they will help jump in and read the transcript and highlight what they thought was important to them or for their brand or whatever the objective is. And it’s easier, more so than ever, with Rev’s transcript editor to do that.

Austin:And I think not everybody is fully aware of those collaboration features and workflows, but that seems to be a really common one in post production teams, is how can we collaborate more with our directors and clients and producers and things like that? And when they discover the transcript editor, they’re like, oh, great, awesome. We have a place where we can all collaborate and rough cut our story before we even start hopping into the footage.

Claire: Awesome. Cool. All right. Let’s talk for a minute about how top of mind speech-to-text has become for businesses everywhere. For example, for any video marketer, we know that ADA compliance and more people than ever watching a video with the sound turned off, have escalated the need and requirements to have video captions and transcription.

Claire: On the other hand, businesses that want to expand their offerings to reach a global audience utilize subtitles. What have you noticed about the trends that have emerged within the speech-to-text industry and Rev features that support their needs?

Austin: Sure. I think, as video content has continued to grow, creators have become increasingly more aware of the need for high quality closed captions and global subtitles, whether it be for video podcasts or online lectures or short form video on a social media platform. More and more viewers want the ability to read what’s being said on screen, whether it’s a necessity for people who are deaf or hard of hearing or people like me, who just like scrolling through videos with their phone on silent at all times.

Austin: And the trend that we’re seeing though, is that not every social media platform, not every video platform has really caught up to that demand for captions. And we’re not seeing the ability to turn captions on or off on several mobile platforms, especially, like you can with YouTube. I think creators are opting in to use burned in captions and just burning the text right onto their video and not allowing it to be turned on or off because I think they see the need. And so they’re figuring out a solution to get it on their content.

Austin: And what cool is, I think most of the time they’re creatively making it a really cool part of their video aesthetic, whether it be the font or the colors that they choose for their captions or where they’re placing it. Some videos, I see them matching it up like speaker bubbles almost. It’s pretty cool. They get really creative on Instagram and TikTok for that kind of stuff.

Austin: But I think this is something that Rev can do for any caption or subtitle order, rather than just having a closed caption SRT file that you couldn’t do anything with, on say Instagram or TikTok. You can just use Rev to re-export your video with the captions burned right on the video and you can customize it to your style preferences. And I think it’s a really cool and fun feature for brands out there. Yeah.

Claire: Tell me about how you personally use Rev and what benefits does it give you from say, a workflow and collaboration perspective?

Austin: Yeah. At my core, I am a video producer turned marketer. So my first ever use case for Rev was getting transcripts for all my long video interviews to help me find all the great soundbites to tell the best story. I wish I’d really known about Rev or speech-to-text in college, because all my documentary projects, would’ve probably been a ton better.

Austin: But once you’ve produced your videos and you’re ready to distribute them out in the wild, as a marketer, I know that I need to, at a minimum, get close captions for my videos. And I think this is the standard we have here at Rev for not just the accessibility reasons, but for the SEO power and juice that it can give to every video. And then from there, we evaluate whether or not we want a video to have global subtitles so that the video can be enjoyable, shareable just beyond English speaking countries.

Austin: And with all these features, the captions, the subtitles, the transcripts, I’m able to collaborate with other content creators on our team who want to write blogs or share it on social media or repurpose it in another way.

Claire: Amazing. What are the biggest benefits your team achieves by using Rev’s transcripts and captions?

Austin:That’s a good question.

Austin: Yeah. As far as a benefit for the team as a whole, I personally think the biggest workflow benefit is our team using interview transcripts to collaborate on. When we create an integrated content set, a written case study, video testimonial, customer story blog, we can all pull great quotes and stats from it to use for our respective content pieces.

Austin: And we can share quotes on social media, that sort of thing. And that all starts from each of us, going in and highlighting and reviewing the transcript together. So I think that’s probably the coolest team benefit aspect.

Claire: There are so many speech-to-text tools available for decision makers. How do you communicate to leads or those differentiators that set Rev apart from the rest?

Austin:I would say, as a former and current customer of Rev, I can confidently say that I’ve never seen better accuracy and turnaround time elsewhere. Like I said earlier, I know that when I submit an order at the end of the day, it will be ready and in my inbox, by the morning at the latest. Sometimes I get a notification at 4:00 AM and it wakes me up, but I know that it will be ready to go and won’t require much editing, if any. Yeah, I think that’s the biggest one for me.

Claire: Thanks, Austin!

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