Video content is a powerful medium that can help you reach and engage your audience. But to maximize its impact, you must make your videos accessible and understandable.
This is where subtitles come in. They can make a huge difference in video marketing, mainly when you use jargon or technical terms.
Increased Viewing Time
Adding subtitles to your videos is one of the best ways to increase the number of people who watch them. Internal Facebook tests show videos with captions have a 12% higher view rate than those without. When you add subtitles to a video, you will also help viewers follow the video more quickly in noisy or distracting environments such as trains, offices, or libraries. This helps them retain more information and get all the necessary details.
Subtitles or captions are also helpful for viewers with hearing impairments. There are around 34 million deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals in Europe alone, and subtitles help them access the same information as everyone else. Creating and editing video subtitles is relatively easy, especially using YouTube’s built-in tools or third-party software such as VEED.
The fact that you can include subtitles in multiple languages allows you to reach a much wider audience. In a world where people share videos online in all languages, this is an essential factor to consider when producing your content. This will allow you to make the most of the vast global market that is available online.
Increased Engagement
Video captions (also known as video transcripts) provide text versions of the audio in a video. They can be displayed on the screen alongside the video or in a separate window. For this reason, adding them to your videos can help you achieve more engagement with your audience. People who watch your video with subtitles are likelier to stay focused, comprehend what’s being said, and stick around until the end. This is a great way to reach your target audience, increase engagement rates and ultimately get more views on your videos.
Many people watch YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram videos on their phones while commuting or at work. They may be unable to turn the sound on and prefer to watch with subtitles. In addition, people with hearing impairments and those who don’t speak English as their first language also benefit from subtitles for better comprehension.
If you want your marketing videos to reach a wider audience, subtitles are crucial. A high-quality translation and subtitling service will make your video accessible to viewers worldwide. It’s best to hire a multilingual transcription company such as Translate by Humans, where your videos can be subtitled in the languages your target audiences speak. This will improve your reach and brand recognition and ultimately increase your business’s sales.
Increased Reach
Video subtitles, captions, or transcripts are an excellent way to reach a wider audience. This is because many people watch videos with the sound off, whether it’s because they are in public or at work or because their device has faulty audio.
In addition, many people watch international shows and movies not initially made in their language, such as popular South Korean dramas like Parasite and Squid Games, German shows like Dark, and Spanish-Mexican shows like Narcos or Money Heist. This is mainly because of the ease with which these shows can be transcribed and translated into English using modern, easy-to-use platforms.
Subtitles and closed captions are also crucial for deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers and those who speak different languages. This makes your content accessible to a much larger pool of potential viewers, increasing engagement and reach.
With all of these benefits in mind, it is clear that adding subtitles to your videos can be a powerful marketing strategy. It’s a great way to increase viewership, boost engagement, improve SEO, and reach a wider audience. If you still need to include subtitles in your videos, we recommend starting! A professional editing platform like Rev can create high-quality, accurate video captions. To start, upload your video and select “Subtitles” from the Content menu.
Better Search Engine Optimization
Adding subtitles to videos is one of the most effective ways to improve search engine optimization. Video caption files are text, and all search engines index them, so your video will likely be placed higher on the results list when people search for specific words in the video’s caption file.
This advantage is especially significant when you add foreign language subtitles to your videos. Since over half of YouTube users are non-native English speakers, you can reach them more easily by adding foreign subtitles.
You can easily add subtitles to your video using a professional online tool like Cincopa. You’ll need to prepare the subtitles in a particular file format and markup beforehand (notepad or TextEdit are good free options), so you may want some help from a freelancer who can translate your original script into subtitles for your video.
85% of Facebook videos are watched on mute, and if your video doesn’t have subtitles, you might lose a large part of your potential audience. Subtitles allow viewers to watch your videos even when they don’t have the sound turned on, and they also make your video more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. It’s an easy and efficient way to increase the impact of your video content.
