You’re a busy marketing professional with a lot to do. You’re trying to keep up with audience trends, changes to your company’s products, and executive goals and priorities. You have budgets to work on, content to create, sales to close, and competitors to beat.

When do you have time to transcribe your video content? You don’t. But someone has to!

And you do need to be focused on video content, both creating it and transcribing video to text. So what’s a marketer to do?

Why worry about video content at all?

Video has become one of the most popular forms of content on the Internet these days.

HubSpot reported earlier this year that 81 percent of businesses use video in their marketing, up from 63 percent the previous year. Of those businesses, 99 percent plan to continue using video. And why not? Survey respondents watched an average of 1.5 hours of video in a typical day.

An Animoto survey also found that four times as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product over reading about it. Consumers tend to have better opinions of companies that provide video, too.

What is video transcription?

A video transcription is the text version of a video’s audio track. The video transcription consists mainly of spoken words, but may also include background noises or music. Transcribing video to text should reproduce the audio exactly, which makes it different from captions that may be abridged to accommodate for time and readability.

Why is video transcription important for marketing?

True, marketers shouldn’t have to transcribe video to text all by themselves. But that doesn’t mean that video transcription itself is not important for a company’s marketing strategy.

Here are just a few reasons that marketing professionals should care about transcribing video audio to text:

Video Transcription Can Boost Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Including a video transcription is a must for improving your SEO. Search engines, including Google, cannot “crawl” the content of a video or a photo to index the data like they can with text. When you transcribe video to text and include video transcription with your online content, this gives search engines another source for indexing your content.

Google can use the data it extracts from the video transcription to get a better idea of your website’s content. This could potentially increase your organic search results.

And don’t forget that, besides hosting videos, YouTube itself is a popular search engine. Including a full video transcription online helps videos rank better in YouTube results.

Lengthy video transcriptions also could be optimized for the keywords you want to rank for. Even before you create the video, make sure to include desired keywords into the script. Once you have the video transcription, those keywords will be ready for search engines to find.

Video Transcription Can Increase Your Organic Reach

In the last year or so, many businesses have been concerned about changes that Facebook and other social media platforms have made to their algorithms. These social-media algorithms determine who sees content the sites have not been paid to promote. While these algorithms tend to favor paid content over “organic” content, they also favor content with higher engagement. Video transcription can help you achieve your desired online engagement.

Since video content tends to get the most engagement on Facebook, adding video transcription takes that a step further. Including video transcription helps users skim content quickly to find the information that is most useful to them. They can also share your content easily, whether by retweeting it online or printing it out and posting it in the company break room.

You might want to consider interactive video transcription, too. An online, interactive video transcript allows the user to click any part of the text to play the video at that section. This helps viewers find the information they want more quickly, making it easier to interact and engage with the content.

Video Transcription Makes Content More Accessible

Did you know that an estimated 10 million people in the United States alone are deaf or hard-of-hearing? This severely restricts their ability to consume content from videos, podcasts, and the like.

Video transcription is a great way to help deaf and hard-of-hearing users access and understand your content. Take this a step further and download the video transcription as an .SRT file that you can use to add captions to the video, as well.

Content accessibility is also important for non-English speakers. Use video transcription to expand your reach and potentially increase the number of views for your video content.

By providing video transcription, you help non-English-speaking users consume and understand your content. They might translate the video transcription into their preferred language, or simply follow the English video transcription at their own pace rather than having to pause or skip around the video.

Video Transcription Creates a Better User Experience

While most consumers would rather watch a video, you shouldn’t neglect those who would prefer to read about a product. Transcribe video to text to help you capture both audiences.

If a user is unable to hear the video, transcription still allows them to consume the video’s information. Video transcription also lets users skim the content to determine whether they really want to watch the video. The video transcript also can help website visitors find the right video by searching your website or page for a particular keyword.

If you have a video transcription, consumers can read it along with a video, which can help them remember the content better. They may also prefer to share the text-based transcript over the video. If consuming your video is a good experience for users, they will be more likely to return for similar content.

How do you transcribe video to text online?

There are several ways to transcribe video to text and get a video transcription online. You can search the many websites offering free or inexpensive video transcription services. These usually use voice-recognition software or hire individuals for video transcription jobs.

Unfortunately, many of the cheap or free options provide inaccurate or unreliable video transcriptions. Often you may find yourself working with non-native speakers who miss some of the more subtle aspects of language used in the video.

Fortunately, Rev offers a simple, accurate, and low-cost video transcription solution. By leaving video transcription to the experts, you have more time for important marketing tasks.

7 Things Marketers Could Be Doing Rather Than Transcribing Videos

1. Creating New Presentations

For many marketers, presentations are an important part of the job. Marketers may be presenting sales and marketing data to their company executives, or hosting a product demonstration at a conference booth. When you can have someone else transcribe video to text, you will have more time to work on your presentation content and technique.

2. Working on New Video Ideas

As we’ve already mentioned, creating video content can pay off big time for your company. But if your time is too wrapped up in transcribing your current video content, you won’t have as much time or mental energy to brainstorm and create new videos. You could end up overexerting yourself and creating sub-par video content, which may be worse than no video content at all!

3. Interacting With Their Audience on Social Media

A company’s social media success partly depends on the effort they put into it. If all you do is throw out a few tweets or Facebook posts once in a while, you should not expect massively profitable results. Instead, marketers should take time to interact with the audience, replying to comments and questions, reblogging other content, and tracking mentions of the company.

4. Studying Ways to Beat the Competition

In business and in sports, understanding your competition is vital for success. This helps you figure out what works for them, how your company can imitate their success, and how your company and products differ. Worrying about video transcription significantly cuts down on the time you have to study, and eventually surpass, your competitors.

5. Working On Sales Pitches

Good content can draw in potential customers, but that’s one part of the overall marketing strategy. The right sales pitch can help answer a prospect’s final questions and seal the deal, but it takes time to create them, implement them, and measure their effectiveness. When you outsource video transcription, you’ll have more time to create better sales pitches.

6. Signing New Business

For most companies, it takes more than just a handshake to launch a new business deal nowadays. Contracts need to be drawn up and sign, final meetings scheduled, and payment plans created. All this takes time that you don’t want to be taken up by more mundane chores.

7. Making More Money in General

All these tasks share a similar goal: increase company revenue, which increases your value as a marketer. More tedious tasks like video transcription shouldn’t have to get in the way of your company’s bottom line or your own professional goals!

Ready to get video transcription off your to-do list?

If you need to transcribe video to text, Rev offers quick, simple, accurate, and cost-effective solutions. All you have to do is follow three simple steps to get your video transcription fast!

1. Upload your video files. Upload your video files to Rev’s secure, confidential server, or copy/paste an online video’s URL.
2. Let Rev video transcriptionists do the work. One of our reliable English-fluent transcriptionists, not software, will transcribe your files. We guarantee at least 99 percent accuracy.
3. Get your video transcription. For videos under 30 minutes in length, expect a turnaround time of less than 12 hours. You’ll receive an interactive online transcript exportable as Microsoft Word, PDF, or plain text.

Rev offers 99 percent accuracy, fast turnaround time, and transparent pricing. Video transcriptions cost $1.99 per minute of audio or video, with free speaker identification and no limit to the number of speakers.

You can add timestamps to your video transcription for an additional $0.25 per minute. Verbatim video transcription (which includes all audio, including laughter and pauses) is an additional $0.25 per minute.

All Rev subscribers can receive the Interactive Transcript player for free! Just grab an embed code from your Rev order page and embed it next to your Kaltura video player. (Currently, interactive transcripts are only available with the Kaltura video player.)

Get started with Rev video transcription today and get back to what you’re best at!