Why is Closed Captioning Important for Video Marketing?

by | Last updated Nov 16, 2023 | Published on Jan 6, 2023 | Business Transcription, Media Transcription

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Video Marketing
Businesses use video marketing to achieve specific goals, such as to build trust, advertise their products/services, and spread their brand message. Success with video marketing largely depends on creating unique content that engages your audience, telling a story that reflects your company’s voice, and building an emotional connect with users. Closed captioning and media transcription services can make your video stand out and boost your marketing efforts.

Why Marketing Videos Need Closed Captions

Closed captions are text provided along with the video with the intention of helping the viewer to interpret and understand the content. Besides benefiting viewers, closed captions are useful for content marketing and SEO.

Here is a list of reasons why marketing videos need closed captions:

  • Increase in online video consumption: “Video marketing has become one of the most popular and effective ways of capturing the attention of audiences across the globe,” according to Statista. Hubspot reported that in 2020, 96% of consumers increased their online video consumption, and 9 out of 10 viewers said that they wanted to see more videos from brands and businesses. Video captioning tools play a key role in using video content for marketing.
  • Improves accessibility: Adding closed captions and digital transcripts to video will enhance access to the content. Transcripts and captions will allow people who have hearing impairments to understand what the video is about. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 5% of the world’s population has disabling hearing loss, which amounts to 360 million people globally. Adding text or captions will also make the content accessible for non-native English speakers by clarifying unfamiliar technical terms, jargon and words. Captions are also useful for people who may prefer to watch video with captions over that without. Some platforms allow you to add closed captions to videos in the language of your choice. Professional translation and business transcription services are another viable option to add closed captioning to your media.
  • Boosts SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) involves ensuring that your content is visible and easy to find on search engines. Search engine bots can read and index closed captions and weight them in search results. This means that captions can help you attract organic traffic. A LinkedIn article cited an experiment performed by Discovery Digital Networks which found that captioned videos got 7.32% more views on average than those without closed captions.
  • Helps drive engagement with content instantly: Many users mute the sound autoplay on their social media videos. Adding closed captioning should be a default for any video created for social media. This increases accessibility and help drive engagement with the content immediately. When viewers see engaging captions, they will want to watch video. Closed captions have also been found to improve the average watch time and to make viewers stay engaged with media content.
  • Increases brand awareness and recall: A study on television advertising published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science showed that same-language subtitles capture more visual attention, and also that same-language commercial subtitles can increase brand recall and memory of other verbal ad information. Likewise, media content with captions and transcripts can boost brand awareness by presenting the name of your brand and company in front of viewers. Facebook found that adding captions to video can increase view time by 12%. Captions and transcripts help viewers recall and retain information about your brand, which can promote sales.
  • Supports social media marketing: Many people watch videos on social media even when they’re not able to listen, such as when they’re in a busy place, on public transport, in a gym or restaurant or a place where don’t have access to headphones. Video with sound can be troublesome in such public settings. Reports say that 85% of all videos displayed on Facebook are watched on mute (www.yansmedia.com). With closed captioning, marketers can ensure users know what the content is about, even when there is no sound. Closed captions are a powerful tool to optimize social media content for viewing and can drive likes, comments, which can attract traffic to your website, create leads, promote sales, and increase revenue.
  • Repurpose video content: Captions provide a written summary of your visual content by breaking down key topics. To make captioning your video easier, create a transcript. This will help you to write good video captions that are creative and effective for your business. You also repurpose the script to generate podcasts, blogs, a white paper, newsletter, or even an eBook, which will provide more options and opportunities for sharing your content. Reach out to a company providing content writing services to ensure well-written, engaging copy.
  • Drives compliance with industry laws: Various broadcasting companies and government bodies have rules that necessitate closed captioning for most programs broadcasted on television. To comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and FCC closed caption regulations, videos must have closed captions.

Captions make marketing videos more accessible and SEO-friendly, and increase customer engagement. Quality is very important when it comes to content marketing. If users notice typos or grammatical errors in captions, it’s likely that they will not take them seriously. While there are many tools that allow you to automatically generate captions for videos, you would need to edit and preview them to make sure they’re correct. This can be time-consuming and difficult, depending on how many videos you have. Relying on business transcription services can ensure high quality transcripts and closed captioning for marketing videos. With reliable support, you can ensure effective captions that can help people find your content and brand more easily and increase your customer outreach. MOS provides accurate business transcription services for audio and video recordings in quick turnaround time. We provide customized solutions for a wide range of industries at competitive rates.

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