Three (good) reasons why you should caption your marketing videos
In a world where the internet is ever-growing, videos are becoming a more and popular way for businesses to market their products and services. Whether it’s how-to videos, question and answer sessions or showing off a new product range, marketing videos are continuing to grow in popularity. However, it’s not just creating amazing content that will generate views and engagement. Adding captions is one of the most valuable things you can do to make your marketing videos reach more people more quickly. Read on to find three good reasons why you should subtitle your videos.
Accessibility
Did you know that in the UK alone, around 11 million people are d/Deaf or hard of hearing? That’s around one sixth! By assuming that everyone who watches your videos can hear the audio, you are potentially alienating a significant proportion of your target audience. Adding captions to show the dialogue on screen will mean that your videos can reach people with hearing difficulties as well as hearing people. And it’s not only those who have hearing impairments who benefit from subtitles. People with conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder can also benefit from captions as they help with audio processing difficulties. By making your videos accessible to all, you are able to reach a much wider audience.
Search Engine Optimisation
Captions can help to boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) and enable your videos to rank higher on engines such as YouTube and Google. This is for several reasons. Firstly, if you add your captions as a separate text file (closed captions), Google can index this file for keywords as with other SEO targeted texts you might have on your website. Having more relevant keywords for Google to index will mean that your videos will rank higher in search engine results. Secondly, studies have shown that people are more likely to watch videos that are captioned. This could be due to accessibility reasons, or because they aren’t able to watch with sound at a given time, on public transport, for example. The more people that watch your videos, the higher they will rank in search engines. Finally, studies have also shown that people are more engaged with captioned videos, meaning they are likely to watch for longer. This is another statistic that Google and other search engines use to rank videos.
International reach
By adding captions to your videos, you will be able to reach more people in more places. English captions on your videos mean that people who are non-native English speakers, or who are learning English as a second language will be able to better understand your videos. This further expands your potential customer reach. Furthermore, having an English captioning file prepared also makes it much easier and cheaper to get your videos translated into other languages, should you decide to market internationally in the future. The translator can more easily translate using the existing timecode template and any queries about the audio will have already been ironed out.
Adding subtitles to your videos will increase the success of your marketing videos in a myriad of ways. More people will be able to watch more easily, people will watch for longer and a result they will rank much higher. If you want advice on how best to get captions added to your marketing videos, don’t hesitate to get in touch at chloestout.translations@gmail.com.