Skip to content

How to Scale Your Global Video Marketing Strategy With Subtitles

How to Scale Your Global Video Marketing Strategy With Subtitles

RevBlogSubtitlesHow to Scale Your Global Video Marketing Strategy With Subtitles

As you continue to grow your business, consider the systems you’ll need to serve a wider audience—specifically, an international customer base. You need an easy way to connect with audiences—regardless of language and geography. Video marketing is an incredibly powerful solution to reach a global online audience. When you pair your video library with the right promotion strategies, you can expand your reach by simply adding subtitles and captions.

Plus, with benefits like increased lead generation and higher customer engagement due to a wider reach, your customer base and revenue will experience growth.

Despite the benefits of video marketing, producing video content is expensive. You can spend anywhere from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars, depending on what you’re filming. But you can cost-effectively scale your video marketing by turning just one video into multiple videos with subtitles in different languages. Here’s how.

Scale Video Internationally With Captions and Subtitles

Subtitles and captions make it easier for you to serve a wider audience. Rev offers subtitles in 15 different languages. Choose which languages to use based on the international markets your video content targets. You can also review where your website and social media traffic is coming from to decide which languages to use. Use Google Analytics or built-in analytics tools on social media to pinpoint audience location. Once you figure out where your international audience is located, you can capitalize on your existing market and identify new opportunities to grow in another country.

Pro-tip: Use Google Analytics or built-in analytics tools on social media to pinpoint audience location.

Another way to scale in international markets is to add captions to English-speaking videos. You’re able to cater to the need international audiences have to see their native language in videos. Adding captions shows you’ve considered your audience’s needs and that it’s important that they’re able to engage with your video content.

Grow Your Audience

If your video content is seen by large audiences at once—like ads that play during opening credits of films—consider adding open captions and subtitles. Text is burned into the film so captions and subtitles don’t require manual activation by viewers. Text always appears on these videos. With closed captioning, audiences have to turn on captions. Open captioning ensures that no matter the audience, they can watch and understand your video.

Other opportunities to use open captioning include videos screened in public places—like restaurants, airports, and gyms—or on social media. Adding subtitles to your videos enables you to cater to non-English speaking and international viewers. Captions make video content more accessible. People with hearing loss can now watch and follow along with the dialogue and audio descriptions of your videos. It also makes videos ADA compliant.

Adding subtitles to your videos enables you to cater to non-English speaking and international viewers. Captions make video content more accessible.

Studies also show that adding subtitles and captions is a good way to increase viewer engagement. Subtitles and captions catch the attention of viewers. As a result, people are more likely to watch these videos for longer periods versus videos without subtitles. When your business caters to an international audience, more people watch your videos and follow a call to action (CTA). You therefore improve your chances of growing your customer base. In fact, by 2022, video will attract an estimated 82% of online consumer traffic. Track metrics like:

  • Average view time
  • Number of views
  • Number of repeat views
  • Average view completion rate
  • Click-through rate
  • Conversion rate

These metrics help you determine how successful your videos are. Use the resulting data to improve your videos as you continue to scale internationally. Review these metrics now, before you scale, and then set goals for what you want to accomplish. Add captions and subtitles, and analyze the same metrics again. Think about what’s changed, where you improved, and where there’s an opportunity to do better. Here are some key benefits to consider when scaling with captions and subtitles:

  • Increased savings
  • Effective timing
  • Improved social media campaigns
  • Flexible video type

Increased Savings

The cost savings to your marketing and video budgets are huge as you scale video marketing with subtitles and captions. Instead of hiring new actors, translating scripts, and filming multiple versions of the same video, you just create one video per campaign and then add subtitles or captions. Regardless of where customers are located, they can relate to your videos because they understand them.

To understand your cost savings, analyze your caption and subtitle budget. Depending on the languages you use for captions and subtitles, compare Rev’s cost of $3–$7 per minute to what you’re currently spending. The money you save here can be used in other parts of your production budget.

Effective Timing

Don’t forget that timing is everything for global companies. Your business moves quickly, and now your video marketing efforts can as well. With a subtitle and caption service like Rev, your subtitles and captioned video content are ready within a day. You can focus on reaching new audiences instead of worrying whether your marketing and video production teams will get done on time.

Contracting an in-house translator adds time to your workflow. They have to caption your English-speaking videos and then translate them to another language. Getting the captions and subtitles to synch with dialogue is also time-consuming, not to mention the risk of human errors. If an error is found during a quality-assurance check, your translator has to go back into the video to make changes.

Improved Social Media Campaigns

Finally, it’s harder to scale your video marketing efforts without social media. There are billions of daily active users at your fingertips, so sharing videos on social helps expand your global reach. Social media doesn’t play a vital role just in attracting people; it’s also a prime channel for using subtitles and captions.

On Facebook alone, 85% of videos are watched without sound. Viewers, regardless of where they’re located, can still follow along and understand each video’s context. And you can convert new viewers into customers. Haas Automation, a machine tool builder, has customers in Europe, America, and Asia. Haas caters to this audience by sharing its marketing and product-maintenance videos in multiple languages.

Using Rev, the company adds subtitles to videos they share on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Partnering with Rev has allowed Haas to build global brand awareness as they scale their video marketing and reach new customers.

Flexible Video Type

Captions and subtitles don’t apply only to online ads and social media videos. Consider all the types of video content you create; chances are, they can benefit from captions and subtitles. Before your next video marketing campaign, list the different types of videos you create. Your list might include tutorials, testimonials, and demos.

Add captions and subtitles to these videos so that no matter where your audience is located in the world, they can engage with the content. Also consider adding subtitles to nontraditional marketing videos: year-end roundups, product announcements, and webinar replays. Your audience views a tremendous amount of video every year, so find unique ways to add captions and subtitles so that you cater to multiple segments of your audience.

Reduce Manual Work With Subtitle Integrations

From recording video to sharing it online, your team has a workflow in place. The more steps within the workflow, the more time your team will spend in the production phase of your video marketing campaign. With Rev’s video platform integrations, you can work subtitling into your existing workflow. Any of your public and unlisted videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo can be tagged for subtitles.

There’s no need for your team to manually upload videos to Rev. Instead, subtitles are ordered straight from Rev. For videos that have been online awhile, it might be hard to find the original video file. Rev saves you time and headache by letting you use the URLs of published videos during upload. You can paste in multiple URLs at once to save even more time.

Pro-tip: Rev saves you time and headache by letting you use the URLs of published videos during upload. You can paste in multiple URLs at once to save even more time.

Rev for Teams

With the Rev for Teams feature, your team can log into Rev, select the type of subtitle service, and select which videos to add subtitles to. Team members have to place an order only once to get access to every file format you’ll need for every platform, software, or distributor. Subtitle integration is especially handy when you have multiple videos to subtitle for multiple international markets. Instead of manually uploading each video individually, your team can tag and add subtitles to everything at once.

Rev also integrates with Zapier, a tool that connects apps and automates workflows. With the Zapier integration, you can automate your workflows by setting up actions and triggers. For example, Zapier can make sure that videos with subtitles are automatically uploaded to Dropbox when they’re ready. Once you set up actions and triggers, your workflows are automated, which streamlines internal video production processes. Simply sign up for a Zapier account, and link Rev to the tools your team already uses.

Once your team has the subtitled video file, they can review it to fix minor issues using Rev’s Closed Caption Editor. For example, the editor lets you fix issues like typos, timing-to-caption mismatches, and incorrect name use. You save time and ensure that your videos are easy to understand by target audiences. Rev also saves your team from having to manually insert subtitles. Without integrations and automation, adding subtitles is time-consuming, especially if teams shoot different types of videos, such as vlogs, tutorials, ads, and testimonials.

Use Transcripts to Create Marketing Campaign Content

Subtitles and captions make your video content more accessible to global audiences. However, you can offer your audience even more content, along with subtitles and captions. When you order subtitles and captions, you receive an English transcript as well.

Transcripts from videos can be used to create collateral marketing material—like blog posts, print ad content, and written testimonials.

Use Transcripts to Create Custom Content

Transcripts are available in English, but the benefit of ordering them is the ease with which you’re able to create written content that can be shared digitally or as a hard copy. For example, with audio, you have to listen repeatedly to find specific content, such as quotes. But with transcripts, you can search the text file for specific words.

You can search for words or phrases by using Rev’s transcript editor or the final Word doc or PDF file you receive. Your marketing team can quickly search to find quotes and insights to add to marketing material. You can even edit the text you pull from your transcripts and add specific keywords you’d like to rank for in Google. Even if speakers used slightly different phrasing in the video, you can update the transcript to use the exact keywords you choose.

Incorporate Search Engine Optimization Techniques

When you paste the updated transcript below your video, you improve the chances of your video being found online. With search engine optimization (SEO), your transcripts increase organic traffic to your videos. People who might not have otherwise seen your video content find you when they search sites like the Google search engine and YouTube.

With this approach to video marketing, you expand your brand reach among your English-speaking audience. This is helpful for capturing the attention of audience members in English-speaking countries. You get additional exposure for your videos and written content when you include links to additional marketing material, such as blog posts. You can incorporate CTAs within your transcript so that viewers have an opportunity to learn more about your brand.

Strategize to Unlock Your Growth Potential

As you can see, video marketing offers incredible potential. By approaching video marketing more strategically—choosing which types of videos to add subtitles and captions to—you can reach more people, engage them longer, and retain them once they find you. As your business continues to grow, enhance your marketing efforts to reach an even wider global audience.

Add subtitles and captions to more types of videos, and analyze viewer engagement. Your audience’s response will tell you where to spend the most time creating videos. For example, your audience might spend more time watching captioned tutorials, so invest more time and energy in creating these types of videos. And remember, as an enterprise user, your data is encrypted for security.

There’s also backup and recovery available. You can work confidently, knowing that your content is safe and secure. Contact us to set up your own shared team folder and to learn more about captions and subtitles.

Talk to a Video Marketing Expert

Affordable, fast transcription. 100% Guaranteed.