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How to Scale Your Video Marketing With Closed-Captions

Rev

Jan 13, 2020

How to Scale Your Video Marketing with Closed Captions

RevBlogCaptionsHow to Scale Your Video Marketing With Closed-Captions

As a marketing leader, you know videos are a goldmine for captivating audiences and driving lasting engagement. Over the past few years, video demand has rapidly increased. Today, a whopping 54% of consumers wanting more video from businesses they support, according to data from HubSpot. (And that’s just one of many video marketing statistics illustrating it’s rising importance.)

But keeping up with audience demand isn’t cheap. Whether you’re creating assets in-house or outsourcing production, video marketing requires a significant investment of your organization’s time, energy, and budget. And although a well-executed campaign can earn powerful ROI, it’s critical you squeeze every last drop of value from the videos you create.

Here are several ways you can get the most from your video investments by leveraging video closed-captioning from a trusted partner:

Extend Your Audience Reach

You know videos are essential for delivering information in a way that’s entertaining and memorable. But they also present accessibility concerns. Not everyone can (or will) watch a video with the sound on.

Without subtitles, hard-of-hearing viewers will miss your message. This also alienates “silent watchers,” or people who prefer to watch videos on mute. (I.e., People who are in a crowded space and don’t have headphones.

But when you add closed-captions to video assets, it makes them more accessible for a broader swath of your audience.
“A truly immersive and intimate video experience starts by giving users the freedom to consume personalized messages in public spaces,” says Paige Breaux, content marketing manager at Acquia in an article for Skyword. “Fostering engagement without imposing on people outside your intended audience builds a greater sense of trust and one-on-one connection.”

Furthermore, closed-captioning improves your video marketing SEO.

Like other types of content, search bots also crawl videos to determine their search value. And videos with a clear title, meta description, and closed-captions are easier to crawl. If you’ve included keywords in those elements, your video is more likely to show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries. The better your SEO and video quality, the higher your video will rank.

And because videos with transcripts are more consumable, they also lower bounce rates. (Which is another factor search engines often factor into rankings).

Pro tip: To expand your reach even further, we also recommend expanding your subtitles to other languages. And we can help with that, too.

Reduce Production Costs and Save Time

Two of the greatest barriers to video marketing production are money and time. So, when you decide to invest in producing video content, you want to be as efficient as possible in both areas.

But tasking an employee with transcribing videos, or editing low-quality auto-captions, means taking them away from other duties. (And if you’re not used to transcribing videos, it can take a long time.)

Then there’s the added frustration of trying to determine which caption file formats you need (and how to convert one to another).

But sending your videos to a reliable transcription service means you don’t have to use internal resources. When you work with us, for example, you’ll get captions fast — and can even rush your order to get them faster. Plus, you can create your own glossary of industry terms and label speaker names for improved accuracy. 

You’ll receive your transcripts in all file formats to use across the web. And you can use our captions editor for quick adjustments, or use tools like Descript to quickly edit your videos.

Repurpose Video Content in Other Formats

Content creation is tedious, and publishing enough material to satiate audience appetites is no easy feat. As a time-stretched marketer, it can sometimes feel insurmountable. Meanwhile, plenty of brands are consistently pumping out high-quality, engaging content. 

What’s their secret?

No, they haven’t magically finagled extra hours in their day (though, that’d be nice). In most cases, prolific content producers are merely repurposing their existing assets.

In other words, when you produce a video, you’re also creating fodder for your blog, social media accounts, web copy, email campaigns, ad copy, and much more. And when you partner with us, we’ll deliver the transcript as a digital, searchable document that makes repurposing a breeze.

For example, using transcripts from one video, you could…

  • Summarize key points into a quick blog post
  • Copy and paste insightful quotes for social media
  • Reuse interesting phrases for ad copy or emails
  • Pull out concepts and data for infographics and slide decks

Additionally, you can publish a video and its full transcript on one page to maximize accessibility and SEO value.

Streamline Your Workflow

Poor collaboration is one of the biggest hurdles modern marketing teams face. Usually, this is a result of unreliable technology or software not built with teamwork in mind.

We understand what it’s like to wrangle multiple versions of the same document. We also know how challenging it can be to save everything in the same place and fit everyone’s feedback into your revisions. That’s why our solution is specifically designed for teams.

Here are three features that will help you streamline your workflow:

1. Folder organization

Every marketer knows a good folder structure can save you time and headaches. Instead of searching through hundreds of random documents, we give you the ability to create customized folders.

2. API built for speed

Fast and straightforward workflows are the foundation of efficient collaboration. Our RESTful API gives you the ability to access our workforce of expert transcriptionists and captioners. Test our API in a sandbox environment and receive production keys to begin placing orders. Then, you can relax while our team captions or transcribes your videos with 99% accuracy.

3. Integrations to help you scale

Saving files in disparate systems can also impede collaboration. But thanks to our partnership with Zapier, you can integrate with your favorite web-based storage systems. (This includes Google Drive, Dropbox, and many more.) We also integrate with video management services like YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove. And we automatically upload completed captions files to the appropriate video.

Reliable transcription from a trusted partner gives you access to text from the videos you’ve spent so much energy creating. Plus, you can collaborate with your team and save transcription documents in a centralized location.

Prolonged Engagement

It’s a well-accepted that videos are more enticing than static imagery. But, it takes more than great moving visuals to keep people watching until they convert — it also takes words. This is especially true on social media platforms, where hundreds of brands are bombarding viewers with content.

“The secret is captions,” says Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CEO of Orbit Media in an article for TechSmith. “Video gets them to slow their scroll, but captions get them to engage.”

In other words, adding captions doesn’t just overcome accessibility barriers — it improves conversions.

In fact, a study by Instapage found CTA clicks fell 26% when they removed subtitles from their Facebook videos.

Of course, results vary by video, brand, and campaign. That’s why we recommend you keep a close eye on watch time, play rate, click-throughs, and other performance metrics. And you don’t have to take our word for it. If you compare results before and after adding captions, we’re willing to bet you’ll see improved metrics and better ROI.

Videos have quickly emerged as one of the best methods for attracting audience attention and driving action. But successful video content marketing doesn’t come cheap, which is why it’s essential you wring all the juice you can get from each video investment. 

By transcribing your videos, you can ensure you’re getting the most out of every video you publish and maximize your marketing dollar.

Affordable, fast transcription. 100% Guaranteed.