Videos are an amazing asset in an online marketeers toolkit. Being able to create a visually exciting and informative form of content can increase your outreach, and make the visibility of your product more competitive. But, videos aren't magic, and other steps need to be taken to help them seek out audiences. That's where captions and transcripts can help.
Smart marketers nowadays are adding captions to every single one of their videos. Whether it is SEO, social media outreach, and even automated emails it's possible to see a huge boost thanks to captions and transcripts. Let's break down a few reasons why every marketer should caption their videos:
Captioning your videos improves SEO
Looking to gain an edge in video SEO? Closed captions come from a text file that your video references as it plays. Search engine bots can read and index these text files, which give your videos extra weight in search results.
Discovery Digital Networks performed an experiment with their videos on YouTube looking at the effect of closed captions on the reach of their videos. They found that captioned videos were watched more, with 7.32% more views than their non-captioned counterparts. Additionally, searching a line of text that appeared nowhere in the title, description or metadata except for the captioning file meant that the video appeared fourth on YouTube. Powerful stuff.
Captioning increases the size of your audience by being inclusive
Captioning opens your video to being viewed by literally millions of people that may not be able to watch it otherwise. These people include the millions of deaf and hard of hearing people worldwide, people with Autism Spectrum Disorder who may have audio processing difficulties, and people with English as a second language who find it far easier to read your content than listen to it. That’s millions of online viewers that are too important to miss out on.
75% of Facebook videos are watched without sound
Three-quarters of all video content is seen on a mobile device. In this age, people are watching videos on their phone everywhere whether its on their morning commute or in the bathroom stall. You can’t afford to have three out of four people skipping your video because it disrupts their neighbor.
According to Facebook:
"Our research found that when feed-based mobile video ads play loudly when people aren’t expecting it, 80% react negatively, both toward the platform and the advertiser. Advertisers should take this into account when creating video ads, making sure their stories don’t require sound to communicate their message.”
Adding captions leads people to spend an average of 12% more time watching your videos. In a world where time is our most precious commodity, that’s more time being spent watching your content.
Captions make emails more attractive!
Getting customers to click and read through your emails is challenging. So, having engaged and visually appealing content in your emails is a priority. Video conveys messages more effectively while maintaining the engagement of the customer. In marketing, by including a simple video in your email can increase the open rate by 19 percent. These don’t even need to be well produced; gifs, or simple recorded customer testimonials can make the difference.
Captions make the video more appealing to the clicked on, giving the potential customer a taste of what the video contains. Let’s not forget how captions expand the potential audience due to its accessibility, involving Deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. The greater the potential audience, the more potential for clicks.
Captions and Transcripts give you more to work with
Content has a flexible role in marketing. Rather than being bound to only one form of exposure, video content via captions has the potential to be shared across a spectrum of mediums to reach a greater audience.
For instance, captioned videos can be cut down and shared via Instagram, Facebook, and even twitter. Not enough? Add transcripts, now you can create blog posts on WordPress to share with business insiders via LinkedIn. You video has data? Use the captions or transcript in an info-graphic. The video content is the base, and captions/ transcripts give it the flexibility it needs to reach its marketing potential.
