A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but according to Forrester Research, a one-minute video is valued at 1.8 million.

This is because video encourages greater engagement than any other medium. Almost 60 percent of B2B decision-makers say they prefer watching videos over other forms of marketing content.

Still, not all videos perform equally. Research shows that when you upload your videos with captions, 80 percent of people are more likely to view them in full.

But it’s not always feasible for organizations to caption every piece of content they produce. Video managers often need to work around challenges like:

• Large volumes of video content
• Fast-paced streams of new, time-sensitive uploads
• Budgetary or resource restrictions

If you’re facing similar obstacles, having a plan to prioritize captioning can help maximize the performance of your video marketing strategy — so you net the best return on investment.

Which Video Files Should Have Captions? 

Captions first emerged as a solution to increase video accessibility among people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Non-English subtitles also work to accommodate the 67.3 million Americans who speak a language other than English at home.

But captions also align with the behaviors of today’s general audiences. Reports show that 69 percent of people view videos on mute in public places — and 25 percent keep the sound off even when they’re in private.

Failing to caption videos doesn’t just cut off these potential viewers. It’s also a missed opportunity to amplify the reach and impact of all of your branded content. This is because:

• Video is 53 times more likely to rank in search engine results, enhancing its discoverability.
• Captions improve video performance metrics like clicks, view times, and bounce rates — signals to search engines that scale content reach.
• Research shows that captions boost message retention and brand recall.   

The right approach can help your organization leverage these benefits with respect to your resources, limitations, and needs.

Captioning Upon Request

At a minimum, video managers must comply with legal accessibility standards. For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires organizations to accommodate any captioning request.

Proactively anticipating this need is especially important for live, virtual events like conferences and webinars. Overlooking a need for captioned content may marginalize some viewers, restricting their ability to participate. But it can also open up an organization to potential legal penalties.  

Make sure that you ask attendees about their captioning needs during the registration process for your next virtual event. This way you can plan for any accommodations you’ll need to make.

Captioning Top-Performing Video Content

Adding captions to your organization’s most popular video files can help extend their reach even further. You increase odds of viewer engagement by broadening accessibility to a wider audience. Each new user action raises a video’s SEO authority, building a digital trail of breadcrumbs to the rest of your content library.

It’s an SEO feedback cycle that continues to scale over time. 

To launch this process, consider adding captions to videos that pique the most interest among your audience — even where there isn’t a captioning request. This could include:

• Presentations from keynote speakers at an event
• Live streams of conference breakout sessions with the most attendees
• Current public-facing videos in your content library with the most views
• Videos your organization will likely re-use in the future

Speech-to-text providers like Rev can help you caption live, streamed video as well as pre-recorded content. Handing off captioning duties to a trusted partner helps you ensure accessibility for your entire audience without the pain of manually doing it yourself. Plus, if you want to review the captions provided by Rev’s professional captioners, you can do so in our Captions Editor platform. This shareable interface lets you make any edits you need before publishing the final version of a recording.

Captioning All Content

With benefits like improved comprehension, better engagement, and amplified SEO, captioning all video content should be the objective for every organization.

It doesn’t have to be a lofty goal, either. Make sure that you’re accommodating captioning requests and then gradually extend the strategy to fill engagement gaps. Whether you’re creating videos regularly or polishing up old content for new uses, you can start including:

• Real-time, live closed captions for live events like webinars and conferences, delivering the best experience for all registrants.
• Select subtitle options like srt files in different languages.
• Closed or open captions for evergreen content like webinars or informational videos.

With its marketing ROI on the upswing, your organization can move to integrate captions into more and more of its video content. We’re here to make these high returns even easier. Rev ensures you get accurate captions in lightning-fast turnaround time — so you can keep accelerating your videos’ metrics without any interruption to your workflow.

Get in touch with our team to start seeing better performance from your videos. We offer automated captions or transcription for live, virtual events, or human captions (with near-perfect accuracy) for your pre-recorded content — and our experts are available 24/7.