From powerful Nike Ads to influencers sharing tasty cooking series, video captioning is changing how customers consume content online. Viewers have grown accustomed to watching videos with text and captioning serves two critical purposes–engaging and providing accessibility.
Even though captions are the secret scroll-stopping videos and deliver the message without switching on the sound, many marketers cannot leverage their power.
With videos making up 82% of the overall internet traffic, what’s stopping you from leveraging the benefits of power-packed videos and providing a holistic viewing experience to customers?
If these statistics do not encourage you to add videos to your social media and marketing material, in this article, we provide some more reasons why video captioning is an absolute must for reaching your target audience.
Why Adding Captions to Your Social Videos is Essential in 2022
If you want to add captions to the video and embrace their power, look at these six power-packed benefits.
1. Enhances accessibility
With close to 5% of the world’s population suffering from hearing loss, adding captions is essential to cater to this population. You cater to a larger audience when you ensure your content is accessible to anyone.
Many people prefer a brand that doesn’t distinguish between customers based on their disability. As access is a universal right for every customer, adding captions to the video content is a small step that positively affects people suffering from disabilities.
Adding subtitles improves your accessibility and helps in maximizing its reach. Also, a brand that creates captioned videos positions itself as an empathetic and inclusive brand while expanding customer engagement to every type of customer.
2. Ensures a seamless viewing experience
Another significant advantage of adding captions to your videos is boosting engagement across different platforms. According to research, 69% of customers watch videos with the sound off in public.
Videos with captions have better engagement metrics, such as impressions, likes, and views. As social media customers want to silently wade through their feeds between work or studies, adding captions makes more sense, as muted videos might not convey the desired message.
A video with the sound off but with subtitles appears intrusive.
This is one of the primary reasons Instagram and Facebook shifted to default muted videos. What makes video captioning more critical is that customers might complete watching a video once the captions hook their attention.
As a result, captioned videos have higher watch times and a better completion rate among your target customers. If you are still not convinced, more than 80% of customers watch YouTube videos to completion by adding subtitles to them.
3. Enhances search traffic
Search engines can’t analyze, watch, transcribe or listen to the audio as they’re programmed to index text.
The presence of captions empowers and enables search engines to ingest your multimedia content and index it on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs).
Consider an SEO-optimized blog post. It has a body of text, byline, and title–all of which Google indexes. Adding captions to your videos is an excellent way to boost your video SEO and enable you to reach your target audience.
Search engine crawlers index video captions or transcripts and help your videos appear on the top pages of Google. Closed captions come in readable files that crawlers easily read and evaluate.
So, when creating captions for your videos, incorporate relevant keywords to ensure your videos rank higher for these keywords.
When creating a video SEO, don’t mix it with your content SEO strategy as they would starkly differ from each other. Often, you rely on subtitles and captions to increase your SEO’s value.
So, next time you have a video content creation on the horizon, incorporate relevant keywords into your subtitles, as it might eventually pay off in terms of video performance and SEO results.
4. Provides clarity on technical jargon and language
Adding subtitles to your marketing videos clarifies your content and helps customers better understand and comprehend technical languages and industry jargon.
For instance, if you’re sharing content with several technical terminologies and unusual names, it might become challenging to convey your message. If your customers don’t recognize half of your words or what you are trying to say, the purpose of your content gets defeated.
Subtitles help in providing clarity for viewers, making it easy for customers to enjoy and learn what they’re watching.
If you have visitors or potential customers who don’t understand the industry’s abbreviations and lingo, it might be challenging to decipher these tricky words.
Subtitles can identify information by rendering visual and audio stimuli.
5. Helps with a language barrier
For brands with customers worldwide, adding video captions reduces the language barrier and helps a brand connect with customers who speak another language. If you have customers in Italy and you operate in Texas, they might find it easy to read the screen rather than listen to the speech in your marketing videos.
This increases comprehension and brings your brand closer to your customers. Your company comes across as a brand that focuses on removing communication barriers.
Also, with one in five U.S. residents speaking a foreign language, providing captions aids millions in mastering pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, and other linguistic features.
Captions help translate the audio or video narration, improve engagement, and increase comprehension. Also, these captions go a long way in lowering the language barrier and helping you grow your audience exponentially.
6. Escalates video performance
The capacity with which your videos engage with your audience directly affects how well they get ranked on different search engines. Typically, a high-performing video with a low bounce rate and higher click-through rate is bound to have a higher ranking than videos without captions.
Adding captions with relevant keywords aligns your brand better with customers’ search queries. If your videos provide the information a customer wants, they will probably have a lower bounce rate.
Also, instead of customers saving your video for later, they can watch the video right away. It even allows customers to juggle multiple tasks on their plates.
When your customers take a greater interest in your videos, it naturally strengthens video performance in terms of engagement metrics and ensures higher rankings.
Best practices to create captions or subtitles
Now that you’re encouraged to create subtitles for your marketing videos, here are a few ways of creating subtitles that deliver the intended result:
Format your subtitles
While there is no thumb rule for creating and formatting subtitles, focus on adding subtitles or text overlays to your videos. For creating a professional-looking video, ensure you perform A/B testing to understand the best position for your subtitles.
Ensure your video goes exactly as per the audio of your title. While most marketers prefer placing captions at the bottom, you can experiment with different positions to add a creative touch to your content. Focus on synchronizing your subtitles to create a seamless watching experience.
Make your subtitle dynamic
Who said that captions are boring?
While creating subtitles, ensure they’re dynamic and interactive.
Adding appealing text boxes or blocks for captions is the key to increasing engagement and enhancing your customer’s viewing experience.
Translate from different languages
Even without your knowledge, any video can go viral. It can reach the world’s remotest corners, making your brand famous within a short time frame. If you’re looking to create such viral videos, ensure to include multilingual subtitles.
Ask your viewers to choose the language they want to read the subtitles. Focus on using professional translators to keep your message intact across different languages.
It’s time to add subtitles to your videos.
After learning the importance of adding subtitles and knowing a few best practices, it’s time to start! While video captioning is no longer expensive or challenging, decide whether you want to achieve it manually or use an automatic subtitling software that provides both manual and automatic subtitling services. Based on your business and requirements, you choose one.
Adding content is an excellent way to supercharge your marketing efforts and ensure your content reaches your audience.
Whether your marketing goal is engaging more customers, creating a loyal customer base, aiming for higher search engine ranking, or gaining more visibility, captions help achieve more goals with a single shot.
Consider your video captioning as an investment that keeps giving back after making efforts for the first time. The wealth of benefits subtitles and captions provide it a must-do for every business looking to make a positive impact on customers.