Video has become the most engaging type of content online, and we’re seeing an increase in brands regularly creating content for video platforms, such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts. So it’s a no-brainer to include video as part of your marketing strategy, but it has to be done properly. Including captions in an absolute must in your videos, and has proven to benefit your overall marketing strategy.
With that being said, here are the 3 reasons why you should be using captions in your video content…
Captions make your content more accessible
Accessibility is essential for marketers and organisations to ensure they are providing equal access for every user. In the UK alone, it’s estimated that 12 million people are deaf or hard of hearing. By including captions in your videos, you can help make your content accessible to a significant chunk of the population.
As well as those who are hard of hearing, people whose first language isn’t English can benefit from captions too. Speech in videos can be too fast for non-native speakers, or too conversational – captions can make your content easier for everyone to understand. Captioning your video content is essential for inclusivity and it means that everyone can enjoy your content!
Captions help your content to be indexed by search engines
YouTube is the second most popular search engine, after Google. So what does this mean? People are using YouTube to search for information! If you’re hosting your videos on YouTube, adding closed captions is a great way to improve your ranking, and boost brand awareness.
Search engines aren’t able to actually watch your videos, but they can read closed captions. Meaning your video content can be indexed by bots, and as mentioned boost your SEO and make your business more discoverable to searchers.
We know that video is becoming increasingly popular for people to consume information. With the continuing shortening of attention spans, people are turning to video instead of consuming long-form content. Wyzowl found that 66% of people prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or a service, whereas 18% said they’d prefer to read a text-based article. By adding video content to your website, you can improve your SEO and drive more traffic to your website.
People watch videos without the audio
We’ve all been in a scenario where we’ve forgotten our headphones when taking public transport. No matter how good your video is, the viewer will likely scroll past when it pops up on their Instagram feed, if there aren’t any captions. No one wants to be that commuter that’s playing videos out loud. Your video content needs to be accessible to people watching with the sound off. 85% of people watch videos with sound off on Facebook – this behaviour is standard across all social media platforms. It’s harder now to capture the attention of viewers with just sound and visuals alone, especially with auto-play features across social media platforms. It’s closed captions that are going to keep the audience engaged.
How can you start using closed captions in your videos?
If you want to stand out from the crowd, It’s important for you and your business to make all of your marketing content accessible. Captions and videos come hand in hand, and it’s just one way for your business to improve the user experience and inclusivity, along with boosting your SEO.
At Life Media UK, we’ll include captions as standard when we work together to achieve your video marketing goals. So you don’t have to worry about creating these yourself, you can leave that up to the experts.
