In the cutthroat world of online video marketing, subtitles and captions are increasingly becoming a necessity for enterprises that are looking to enhance their prospects and generate more leads. There are numerous ways in which businesses can use video captions to their advantage. Your brand’s social media platforms are more likely to register more video viewers, as well as increased overall video watch time.

From corporate giants to small and medium enterprises, many brands will bear testament to the fact that the power of captioning in enterprise marketing today cannot be overstated.

Marketing departments all across the globe have enjoyed immense SEO benefits and attained a wider audience reach by simply embedding closed captions to their social media promotional videos and blog video posts.

Below, we’ve detailed how video captions and subtitles can help you build your own enterprise’s prospects. But, first, let’s explain the difference between the two!

Difference Between Subtitles and Captions Explained!

Many people tend to confuse captions with subtitles. The latter are text transcripts of the dialogue within an audio file, or the audio track of a video file

Captions – on the other hand- not only capture the spoken audio, but also additional non-speech sound elements; in a bid to facilitate increased viewer understanding of an audio/video file’s context. You can- therefore- have a promotional video with no dialogue, but with captions, to enhance your audience’s understanding of the message you’re communicating.

Benefits of Adding Subtitles/Captions to your Videos

With video captions and subtitles, your business stands to gain in terms of improved SEO, increased accessibility, and increased shareability.

Let’s take an in-depth look at these benefits and more, below!

Increased Audience Engagement on Social Media

On social sites like Facebook, video posts automatically play without any sound, with an option to turn it on. Whenever most users are lazily scrolling through their home feed, it’s unlikely that they’ll get engaged with a video and turn on the volume to watch it further, unless they can establish what’s going on within the video and whether it’s a subject that interests them.

By close-captioning your social media promotional videos, you’ll be according your viewers a way of establishing the context. Just ensure to include some keyword captions within the first ten seconds of your video that gives away the context, as this is approximately how long it usually takes for social media viewers to decide whether they’d like to continue watching a video post or not.

The reason why you should try to get your viewers to watch for longer is pretty simple! They’re more likely to click on your call-to-action (CTA) links to your website’s landing page once they’ve watched your videos long enough to establish whether the products/services that you offer is something that they need.

Improved Search Engine Rankings

Without subtitles/closed captions for your social media and blog video posts, search engine crawl bots are left with only your video metadata to work with for indexing purposes. However- by including transcripts for the videos on your brand’s website and social media pages, you’ll be availing more textual information, which search engines can crawl through for proper indexing. This allows your pages to rank higher in searches, thus driving up search traffic to your platforms.

Increased Audience Reach

When you include subtitles and closed captions as part of your video marketing strategy, you’ll be making your promotional videos more accessible to those with hearing disabilities, as well as those in settings that may limit normal hearing- such as noisy public spaces. On top of that, there are several foreign language speakers that you could target with translated closed captions. Such prospects wouldn’t – otherwise- be interested in your brand since they’d likely not understand your promotional videos messages due to the language barrier.

Additionally – since video captions are usually time-coded, social media viewers can easily copy an informative section of the text, or a certain quote that they like, and share it with other platform users. This enhanced shareability means that more prospects will be exposed to your videos, and by extension, your brand’s products and services.

Get Started with Quality Transcription Services

In the last few years, subtitles/captions have gradually grown from a marketing privilege- of sorts- to a necessity. Most multinational enterprises are now adding them to their online promotional videos to boost their shareability, accessibility and watch times. Add to that, the fact that giant social media brands like Facebook are increasingly incorporating video closed captioning capabilities, and what you have is a video marketing phenomenon that you and your brand can’t afford to ignore.

However, before you decide to incorporate subtitles/captions to your promotional video content, it’s important to think of how exactly you’ll get it done, as the transcription method you choose will determine the quality of your video caption transcripts.

Facebook – for instance – offers the option of automated closed captions for video. Such automated transcription tools – however – typically register high error rates. This is why you need to trust in human-based online transcription services, as they will accord you more accurate transcripts.