Captioning and Transcription for Marketing Content

March 22, 2018 BY PATRICK LOFTUS
Updated: February 7, 2024

By 2019, 80% of the world’s internet traffic will be video and social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.

The stats don’t lie: video marketing works because people can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet video content.

So, if you want to ensure your brand stands out in search results and amongst the endlessly refreshing newsfeeds of the world, you need to make sure your videos are designed to engage and connect with as much of your audience as possible. That includes the hundreds of millions of deaf and hard of hearing people worldwide who rely on closed captions to watch video.

By adding captions and transcripts to your marketing videos, not only are you making your brand accessible to people who can’t hear, you’re also gaining more views overall thanks to increased user engagement and SEO benefits.

What is important to marketing content publishers?

a loudspeaker shouting the word Important

  • SEO – Companies want their marketing videos to show up in search results when they are related to a target keyword. Google can’t “watch” your video, so it must rely on other associated information like video transcripts and metadata (information about the video buried in code) to understand what the video is about and whether it is related to a search term.
  • Education & Engagement – Some marketing videos, such as tutorials and how-to guides, are meant to educate an audience and encourage sharing on social media for branding purposes. Studies have shown that captions are helpful for learning and retention. In many cases, having text on screen also serves as the primary method of communicating information (e.g. a recipe video) and holding onto viewer attention.
  • Easy Workflow – Video publishing from start to finish needs to be easy, especially for a busy marketing department. There are many other projects going on and a marketing team’s resources should be focused on creating great content. Adding captions shouldn’t reinvent or delay the video publishing workflow — it should be as seamless as possible.
  • Legal ComplianceFederal laws in the United States like the Americans with Disabilities Act (AD) and the Rehabilitation Act require equal access to most publicly available web content for people with disabilities. Lawsuits over inaccessible websites and web content are driving companies to proactively ensure their videos include closed captions or transcripts for deaf and hard of hearing people.

What are the common challenges with captioning marketing content?

sketch of someone scaling a mountain side

  • Accuracy & Precise Terminology – You want your video to clearly communicate and represent your brand, so the last thing you want is a typo in your captions or transcript. Some video players and platforms feature speech recognition technology that generates free, automatic captions (like YouTube’s) but these captions can only achieve about 80% accuracy and don’t include speaker labels, proper punctuation or spelling, and other features of proper captions that ultimately require human editing. This is especially true when your video uses specialized terminology or names that are specific to your organization.
  • Limitations on Social Media – Not every social platform is the same when it comes to video. Twitter and Instagram require caption encoding (open captions) and Facebook requires a special naming convention for their caption files – both of which 3Play Media provide out of the box.
  • Global Audience – Depending on the size and region of your audience, you might need subtitles for your video. Luckily, our translation services are seamlessly integrated with our captioning and transcription services so you don’t need to look elsewhere to translate your video.

What vendor solutions are important to marketing content publishers?

sketch of a little street vendor's rolling cart storefront

  • SEO Embed Plugin – SEO is critical to your video’s success, but publishing the entire transcript of your video can take up valuable space on your webpage. With our SEO Embed Plugin, we allow users to make their video’s transcript indexable by search engines without needing to publish it on the same page. It’s like sneaking an entire transcript onto your webpage that only Google can see!
  • Competitive Pricing – We combine speech recognition technology with two levels of human editing and multiple turnaround options to provide high-quality captions at a low price point.
  • Fast Turnaround – Sometimes marketing means getting the word out faster than your competitors. With turnaround times ranging from 2 hours to 10 days and nearly everything in between, we can accommodate any marketing team’s video production schedule and budget.
  • Ease of Use – Our easy-to-use account system was designed for fast onboarding so you and your marketing team can start captioning your videos right away.
  • Integrations with Video Players – We want your captioning workflow to be as simple as possible. That’s why we offer captioning workflow integrations with major video players like Wistia, YouTube, and Brightcove, and 50+ caption file output formats. And if we don’t already have a solution for the video player used by your marketing team, our talented developers can get working on one for you!
  • Interactive Transcript – If your team runs an ongoing series of content like webinars or podcasts, associating an interactive transcript with a video gives people more of an opportunity to engage with your content. Users can keyword search the audio and navigate to any point in the video where that word is spoken. Adding a transcript to your page also comes with inherent SEO benefits and ensures your content is accessible to people with hearing loss.
  • Other Tools – Check out our list of other helpful tools like caption import, caption editor, vertical caption placement, and open captioning on our Tools Page.

Customers Who Use 3Play for Marketing Content

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