With thousands of ads rocking the internet from websites and apps such as YouTube, it is very important to make sure that your ad is convincing as possible and appealing to practically everyone. These days, crafting high-quality content for ads is vital as people have become too smart and have seen hundreds of ads that they can compare. Therefore, it is up to you as the advertiser to make sure that your ad stands out.
One way of making sure that your marketing stands out is through the use of closed captions. This article discusses close captioning, including why it is important to give it a try.
What is Closed Captioning?
In simple words, closed captioning is the text often on the auditory portion of a video. It’s like some form of a subtitle. It provides a written form of the things being said on the video, making it easier for deaf people and individuals who find it hard to hear. Furthermore, it helps the viewer get the point being delivered even when the video is muted or there is a lot of background noise. Using closed captioning is vital in marketing, and it can help you improve your marketing efforts in the following ways:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
We all want our websites to be on the top spots of the search engines. However, cracking SEO is not always easy, regardless of your effort into it. Still, using closed captions could help you crack this tough nut and improve your ranking on the search engine.
Generally, the search engine cannot literally watch your videos, but it can collect information from the closed captions included using web crawlers. The text enables the search engine to index a video, thus helping your content to rank higher than the competitors. Additionally, closed captions increase users’ watch time, a very critical factor that determines the ranking of a video on sites like YouTube.
2. Social Media Marketing
These days, social media is full of videos. A few years back, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that we would be living in a video-first world, where social video will be vital to everything. Well, it is safe to assume that we are already there. People are likely to be influenced by a marketing video on social media than just a mere text.
Sound is an important component of a video as it offers the context of the video and can even influence the viewer’s mood. However, that’s not always enough. These days, many people watch muted videos. If your video is not made to adjust to this reality, the viewer will definitely not know what is going on in the video. But with closed captioning, the user can easily know what is going on by reading the text even when the video is muted.
3. Email Marketing
Crafting emails and newsletters is not always easy, and it can get quite tiring and even boring. It can also get a bit frustrating to imagine that the people receiving the newsletters might not even be reading them. Luckily, you could breathe new life into your newsletters by including videos or Gifs with closed captions. Including a video in your emails can increase the open rates by up to 19%. The closed captions ensure that the receiver can get the information on the video or Gif even in the office without making noise to the others.
4. Expand Your Audience
By captioning your videos, you get to expand your audience to millions of people by making the content more accessible. In America alone, over 36 million people are either deaf or have problems with hearing. What’s more, about 5% of the world’s population has problems hearing. Therefore, if you put your videos without closed captions, it means that the majority of those individuals don’t get to enjoy your videos or get the information your ad has.
Furthermore, non-native English speakers often struggle to hear the actual words being communicated in a video. They are likely to enjoy the video more with closed captions, increasing your audience even more. Improve your marketing efforts by hiring captioning services for your videos and enjoy audience expansion and engagement, watch time, and social sharing.
