When you’re putting time, money, and effort into creating materials for video marketing campaigns, you want to get those videos in front of as many viewers as possible. 

While many businesses and brands treat them like an afterthought, speech-to-text services can help you expand the reach of your video marketing campaigns significantly, both by adding closed captions to videos and using foreign language subtitles. Let’s take a look at why this is so important and how it can help your campaigns. 

How Closed Captions Can Expand Reach 

Closed captions can expand your reach exponentially for a number of reasons.

The first is that they increase accessibility tenfold. Closed captions allow those who are deaf or hard of hearing to be able to fully engage with your video.  

Since approximately 48 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss, this is a massive segment of your audience you could better serve. Not only does this allow all potential viewers to have positive and inclusive experiences, but as an added bonus it also can prevent accessibility lawsuits from impacting your business.

Even for users who aren’t hard-of-hearing, captions can be a huge advantage. Around 85% of Facebook users watch video without any sound by choice, so neglecting to add closed captions could cause them to keep scrolling instead of encouraging them to stop and watch.

Closed captions can also go a long way in expanding your reach in search engines, too, making it easier for new users to discover your videos and your brand. 

When you upload closed captions through plain text SRT files, platforms like YouTube and Google can actually read the closed captions and understand the context of the video. This is a massive advantage that shouldn’t be ignored. 

Why Foreign Subtitles Are So Important 

Many businesses today aren’t focused exclusively on local or even national audiences.

 If you want to scale your video campaigns beyond local viewers, adding subtitles in other languages is an important first step. Without this, people who speak additional languages won’t be able to properly view your content in its entirety. 

Foreign subtitles can be added to your videos much like closed captions, and they can be enabled by viewers who need them, allowing you to capture new audiences you’d have missed otherwise.

Why Speech-to-Text Services 

Video strategy and creation are already massive undertakings. It’s no surprise that some businesses dread the thought of adding closed captions and subtitles in other languages onto each video. 

Fortunately, there is an easy solution.

Here at Rev, we offer services to use speech-to-text to create closed captions and foreign language subtitles. 

With speech-to-text services, send us your video and our team of transcription experts can send you your file with closed captions within 24 hours. You can review them and then receive them in your preferred format, including SRT. 

Our foreign translation service works similarly. Send a video in English, let us know what languages you want to receive subtitles for, and our team of native translators will get to work. You’ll receive your subtitles within 24 hours, and we can even help you add them to the video itself. 

Why Rev? 

Whether you’re interested in closed captions, foreign translations, or both, Rev can help you expand your reach significantly. 

 We’re flexible in how we receive videos and have plenty of integrations with tools like Zapier available to make the process as simple for you as possible. 

We also offer lightning-fast turnaround times so you’ll never be waiting to launch your campaigns, and our closed captions and subtitles come with 99% accuracy guarantees.

Final Thoughts 

If you want to increase the reach of your video marketing campaigns, the easiest answer isn’t seeking out some growth-hacking strategy or SEO secret. 

Instead, the first thing you should do is ensure that the content you already have is accessible to as many members of your target audience as possible. Adding closed captions and foreign subtitles is an important part of that, and it’s always worth the effort.