8 Proven Benefits of Video Transcription for Content Marketing

As many as four times, customers prefer to watch a video about a product rather than read about it. Video marketing has taken the marketing world by storm and will only grow.

It offers endless potential for content marketers to bring variety and innovation to a brand’s marketing efforts. If you’re a content marketing specialist on the lookout to improve your video marketing efforts, video transcription is one such way to boost it.

It not only improves the quality of your videos but also helps your content rank better on Google. Read on to learn the eight proven benefits of video transcription to transform your marketing game.

Video transcription in digital marketing

Video transcription is the process of adding captions to a video. This is huge for digital marketing strategies hoping to reach a wider audience.

Captions are the text of what is being said in the video. They enhance the experience of viewing a video, making it more complete for viewers. Higher profit margins come from a larger viewership of your content, therefore an integrated digital marketing strategy is necessary.

Viewers who benefit from captions range from:

• Hearing impaired viewers.
• Viewers who don’t understand the language in the video.
• Viewers are unable to play the video with the sound on.

This digital marketing trend is more common with viewers who scroll with the sound turned off. They might be in a social setting, on public transport, at work, on in bed at night. The idea is to not disturb others around them. If they land on your video they’ll quickly scroll past if you don’t have captions.  

Video transcription aims to also capture all the sound movement in the video. So, it’s not just limited to what is being said, but also things like laughing and sneezing along with noises in the background such as a siren or car horns, for a more holistic experience.

There are very many benefits to captioning your videos when creating digital marketing content.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the most prominent benefits of video transcription:

1.  Expands your reach

Over 48 million Americans and 360 people worldwide suffer from disabling hearing issues. Such people cannot consume videos unless they are captioned. Marketing content that doesn’t have videos with captions will fail with this group of audience.

Captioning your video content instantly expands its reach as more people now have access to them. This includes people with hearing disabilities. Happy Scribe’s automatic subtitling software helps you caption your videos in minutes and reach a wider audience.

Being able to reach a wider audience automatically improves traffic on your website, landing pages, and content. More people will be interested in your content as they have better access to it and higher are the chances that they engage with you further.

2.  Helps with compliance

To protect the rights of disabled people and ensure their access to the same resources as the rest of the population, the FCC has laid down laws that require videos to contain closed captions. Businesses need to comply with the rules to avoid legal action.

Organizations have been slapped with lawsuits for failing to provide proper captions for their online video and audio content as well. To avoid this legal hassle, your brand needs to caption the videos it puts out.

Transcribing videos doesn’t just bring you a plethora of benefits such as increased traffic and accessibility, it’s also a legal need for you as a brand. The only way to ensure you don’t face legal action regarding it is to simply caption your video and audio content.

3.  Boosts rankings

Google and other search engines cannot watch a video to know its context. They rely on crawling the audio and video content to be able to index it. This makes captioning videos extremely important to allow Google to crawl the video.

Google would search for indicators in your content to know if it’s going to be beneficial for searchers. By adding captions, you can easily include the keywords you wish to rank for and help Google pick them up during the crawl.

Google identifying your content as helpful to searchers helps it rank better. It’s one of the most important goals of SEO as people rarely look past the first page of Google. Getting your content on the first page gains the most traffic.

4.  Creates valuable content

Having captions on your video helps you create more valuable video content. The videos are more complete and appeal to a wider audience. People get more out of them as their user experience is better with your content now.

Improved audience comprehension of your videos directly impacts the audience’s interaction with your brand and their perception of it. When they receive valuable content, they cherish it more than any run-of-the-mill content.

They’ll be able to understand it better and connect with it. They would remember the content better as well. It has cognitive reinforcement when they hear the content at the same time, helping them remember it better and in a positive light.

5.  Lowers bounce rate

One of the lesser-discussed advantages of video transcription is the crucial role it plays in lowering your bounce rate. Even a minute-long video will help make a user stay longer on your webpage than they would without the video.

Videos make users stay longer on a webpage, lowering the bounce rate of the website. So, having the video transcribed will help you make it more attractive, engaging, and useful to the user, making them stay longer.

The longer a user stays on a webpage, the better it ranks with Google. Insert your text content such as blogs and articles with related videos that provide additional content as it will make the user get more out of the piece and stay on the website longer.

6.  Provides link-building opportunities

Another underused advantage of video transcription comes with link-building opportunities. It helps with both internal and external link-building strategies, i.e., linking to your websites and getting external websites to link back to you.

For internal link building, your videos can reference your own web pages when discussing any topic. The transcript will link to the specific pages, helping the user to navigate to them for more information on the topic.

This way, the user will not have to go elsewhere to get more information. They can get it all with your pages, clicking on the next relevant topic as they go along.

For backlink building, creating valuable videos will get users to share them the most on their blogs and social media, getting you backlinks. A transcribed video is a complete content package ready to be shared without much input from the user.

They will be more willing to share a transcribed video than one that is not transcribed. This way, the transcription helps you get more external linkbacks to your content.

7.  Eliminates the need for sound

Video captioning aids in a flexible viewing experience for users. It eliminates the need for sound. So, the user can watch it on mute if they want. They may turn the sound on but it’s not a necessity anymore.

This flexibility allows for viewing in sound-sensitive environments. Users can watch your video when they are in public and don’t have or want to use headphones. They can watch it in a quiet environment or in a loud space.

Many social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter have the default setting for videos that they’ll have to play without sound. A user will have to manually turn on the sound if they wish to. This makes closed captioning extremely important for marketing videos.

YouTube, the pioneer of video content on the internet, has also added closed captioning to its mobile application in a bid to keep up with other social media platforms. Its user interface now makes the videos play on mute with its own captioning even if the user has not clicked on it.

8.  Opens up new markets and opportunities

As closed captioning of videos helps them reach a wider market of consumers, it opens brands up to newer market opportunities to expand. You can target foreign markets that may not speak the same language as you with your captioned videos.

It helps you penetrate different cultures that might not have consumed your video content before. Now, you may choose to generate subtitles in English as it’s the international language spoken around the world.

Or you can generate subtitles in the native language of the foreign market you’re targeting as it helps you engage with them better. They’re more likely to click on a video that is subtitled in their own language than in English.

Transcription can also help you go a step further by creating content directly in the foreign language of the market you’re targeting. You can create the subtitles in English and then hire a third party to add a voiceover in the foreign language of choice based on the English script.

Video transcription helps you create accessible content for a broad market audience

Video transcription has emerged as a necessity with the increasing demand for video content in the marketing industry.

Content marketing specialists are focussing on creating valuable video content that engages consumers with video transcription. Video captioning eliminates the need for sound in a video, making it much more accessible to audiences of all kinds.

It brings more people to your website, increases its ranking, and lowers the bounce rate. It helps boost SEO by helping you rank better with Google and helps you target foreign markets.

Let us know in the comments how you think video transcription helps content marketing and SEO.