How to 10x Your Videos: Why Adding Subtitles Boosts Your Digital Video Strategy

What’s the best way to make your videos ten times more effective? There are plenty of different ways you can use video marketing to your advantage. From video optimization to great thumbnails to calls to action (CTAs). All of these things are simple ways to help produce compelling video content.

What’s our secret? Video subtitles.

Add subtitles to videos and see just how powerful they can actually be. In this post, we’ll talk about video marketing, different video tips, and why you need to add subtitles.

What is Video Marketing?

It’s a marketing tactic that uses video to promote a company, product, or service. In fact, incorporating video into your marketing mix will help to create a solid marketing strategy.

What are some examples of video marketing? The sky’s the limit. As a brand, you can develop videos about customer testimonials, events, training, how-to’s, and much more. If you think a video will resonate with your audience, it’s probably a topic worth covering.

Video marketing is a great marketing technique that can help to separate you from the competition and establish you as an expert in your industry.

Benefits of Using Videos In Your Digital Video Strategy

We know what you might be thinking right now: what exactly are the benefits of using videos? How can video marketing directly impact my business? And why in the world would I need to add subtitles to my videos?

Let’s dive right in.

1. Video Increases Conversion and Sales

One of the most significant benefits of video marketing is the way that videos emotionally connect with your audience. In turn, this feeling of connection can lead to an increase in conversions. Why do you want more conversions? It means that your potential customer is taking one of your desired actions. Whether that action is reading a blog post or filling out an online form for more information, your customer is engaging with your brand which is exactly what you want.

Additionally, videos can also lead to an increase in sales. And more sales means more revenue for you, right? Right.

In fact, online studies find that 57 percent of people are more willing to make a purchase after they watch a product demonstration video. Add to that video subtitles that allow it to reach a global audience — even better!

2. Video Helps You to Build Trust

Video marketing is one of the best ways a brand can build trust with potential customers. With thousands of companies competing for your customer’s attention, it’s essential to enter your marketing efforts around this pillar.

In creating videos, you can bridge the gap between your business and your customers. Videos allow them to truly see what your company is all about, thus helping to build trust. Add subtitles into your videos and you can increase the effectiveness and earn even more of that trust.

3. Video Stimulates Social Shares

Videos bring your brand to life. They are a medium that will stop viewers in their scrolling tracks. A well-crafted video will even boost engagement, audience reach, and video views by generating more likes, comments, and shares on social media.

In fact, videos are shared more often than any other piece of online content. This means that your video and brand will reach a new audience and can even attract new customers that you might not normally have attracted without video marketing.

Add subtitles to your videos, especially those you’re planning to post on social media, and you can significantly boost video engagement. Having your message in both audio and text can help ensure that your message can be heard (and read) by everyone, no matter what.

Tips and Tricks To Increase Your Video Views

Now, let’s focus on some tips and tricks to increase the power of your videos by ten times (psst, most of them are super easy to do!).

1. Make Sure Your Videos Are the Right Length

How long should videos be? Let’s be real, with the millions of different pieces of content floating out there, you need to be very strategic in how you capture your video viewing audience. A video that’s too long can actually frustrate and deter customers from watching the entirety of it. They could miss the point of your video and not take action.

Conversely, a video that’s too short can leave your audience confused and wanting more. What’s so wrong about that? While you might think this will entice them to go to your website to learn more, often your audience won’t do that. Having a video that’s too short or leaves a lot of unanswered questions can drive your customers away.

So how long should your videos be? It honestly will depend on the platform where they will live, but typically, social media videos should be between 60-90 seconds. Videos on your website or YouTube can be a little bit longer (2-3 minutes), or even last up to an hour (think webinar recordings and product tutorials).

2. Talk About Interesting Subjects

Another way to capture more video views is to produce a video about a “pain point” that your customer is facing. Answering a question or providing a solution that will benefit your target audience will be interesting to them and allow them to trust your brand and ultimately purchase your product or service.

So how do you ensure that your video is about an interesting and relevant topic? Humanize it with a real-life story. For example, if you’re a lawyer looking to drum up more business, let one of your client’s share their story and experience with your firm. Their genuine happiness will shine through. Plus, that makes for a more entertaining video than just a traditional “talking head” lawyer video that spits out benefits and could come across as disingenuous. People tend to connect most with other people.

3. Incorporate Subtitles in Your Videos

Add subtitles to video online means that your video will be that much more digestible and relatable.

Think about it this way: would you rather watch a cooking recipe video where you have to turn the sound on? Or would you be more likely to watch and engage with a cooking recipe video that has subtitles so you can cook along with them or even have time to write down the recipe? Nowadays, it’s all about convenience, so we’re going to go with the latter.

Of course, this is just one reason you should add subtitles to video. Other reasons include making your videos accessible to those who are hard of hearing and in those situations when the sound can’t play. If that isn’t enough: add subtitles to video, and we know that you’ll see an increase in your YouTube watch time by 40 percent.

Use Video Transcripts and Captions

Did you know that 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched with the sound off? Wouldn’t you want to reach those individuals? We think you might, and the best way to capture them is with a video caption.

Captions are actually a bit different than subtitles as they both serve a different purpose. Closed captions capture all dialogue in addition to describing background noises and audio that’s crucial to the screen. On the other hand, subtitles are the text alternative (often translations) for the audio. Only spoken words will be used when you add subtitles to a video.

Both; however, are great to incorporate into your digital video strategy as they will allow your videos to be more widely viewable and accessible.

How Do You Add Subtitles to a Video?

That’s easy! There are two different ways: DIY or hiring an online transcription company.

In order to figure out the best path for adding subtitles to a video, you’ll want to think about a few key things:

Time. How much time can you spend on one video?
Budget. Can you afford to hire a company or will it cost too much for you to DIY?
Accuracy. Will you have to review the files more than once if you DIY or use software instead of a human subtitler?

Furthermore, if you do decide to DIY, what method will you use? YouTube’s free automatic captioning? Or will you be watching your video and manually typing out the captions or subtitles that way?

Alternatively, you could work with a company who specializes in transcripts and can easily create subtitles for your video.

Take Advantage of Subtitling Services

When you use a service like Rev, you can rest easy knowing you’re working with a trusted company who will provide top quality service. Our team knows how to add captions to videos so you can focus on other essential to-dos.

Why use Rev?

• Humans, not software or robots, transcribe and translate your videos. This means we’ll be able to pick up on nuances in the speech that might otherwise get overlooked by machines.
• 99% accuracy or better. Upload glossary terms or proper name spellings alongside your file to make sure we’re recording text accurately.
• We charge $1 per audio file minute for captions and $3-7 for foreign subtitles. Not only is this the best price around, but we won’t charge extra for multiple speakers or accents.
• Our turnaround time is fast. We deliver files under 30 minutes in length in 12 hours or less. Often, we’re even speedier than that!

4. Add Thumbnails

It’s important not to underestimate the power of a great video thumbnail. Fortunately for you, thumbnails very often get overlooked. Using them in your video strategy will allow your brand to stand out and take even more advantage of the power of video.

What should you include in a video thumbnail?

Use an image that summarizes your video topic. Choose an image that will be captivating enough to make viewers stop scrolling. When editing your image, make sure it has a nice contrast that will “pop.” Bright images also draw attention to your video thumbnail.

5. Include Calls to Action

It’s very important to think about how you want your audience to engage with your brand after viewing your video. That’s where calls to actions come into play.

A call-to-action or CTA is usually a statement or button used to get your reader or viewer to take a desired action. For videos, a great CTA would be to get them to either sign up for a white paper related to the video topic or to fill out a form for more information.

Oftentimes, CTAs appear at the end of a video. And while that’s not a bad idea, we also recommend to include one after the first 30 seconds. Why? This way if a viewer doesn’t watch your video all the way through, you still have a chance at engaging them.

How To Use Your Video Strategy to Reach People Who Will Love Your Brand

Now that you have a digital video strategy in place, you can leverage those videos to produce even more content which will help to increase your chances of being found in more searches.

1. Create Derivative Content

When you transcribe your video and add subtitles, it opens the door to creating other types of marketing content, such as:

• Blog post
• White paper
• Email
• Shorter teaser videos
• GIFs
• Social media posts

All of these content pieces can be shared on social media, your website, and through emails.

2. Index Your Videos For SEO

When you add subtitles to your videos and post them on YouTube, you have a greater opportunity to reach more people. In fact, companies who add subtitles to video see a significant rise in video views — alas the power of subtitles!

The Bottom Line

Sometimes it’s easier to think about increasing the power of your videos than actually doing it. Let the team at Rev help you to 10x your video efforts. Head on over here for more information on how to add subtitles to your videos.