The 4 Reasons Why Your Videos Should Have Closed Captions

Videos are a popular method of marketing in today’s digital age. After all, it helps businesses showcase their products and services even better than words can. When creating marketing videos, you can improve them and attract viewers’ attention in various ways. One popular method of doing so is by adding closed captions.

Let’s explore why closed captioning is important when creating video content.

1. Increases your audience reach

Including closed captions in your marketing videos can help your business improve its customer base. This is because videos with closed captions allow you to tap into an international audience. Often, captions are more effective when translated into multiple languages. However, even English-only captions can do wonders for your video’s audience reach.

Closed captions are essential for this effort because they help international audiences understand its contents. This is useful even if they aren’t too fluent in understanding the language yet. In fact, if they’re learning English, captions can aid them in further understanding your video’s contents.

By assisting an international audience in understanding your products and services, you can increase your business's customers. This could lead to an increase in sales or even conversions for your business’ website. As such, when creating a marketing video, it's always best to consider including closed captions before posting.

2. Closed captioning services diversify your audience

By adding closed captions to your videos, you make them more accessible to a more diverse audience. Closed captions can be useful for viewers who are either hard of hearing or have complete hearing loss.

According to the WHO’s findings, around 5% of the world’s population suffers from hearing loss. By 2050, this number is expected to grow further, either due to unsafe listening practices or genetics. This makes the inclusion of closed captions in your video more relevant than ever.

By adding closed captioning to your marketing videos, those with hearing disabilities will not only have access to these resources but also be able to understand them better. As a result, you’ll be able to diversify your customer base.

When including videos as part of your marketing efforts, keep in mind that customers are drawn to businesses that are inclusive. In many cities, such as Boston, closed captions for video are becoming mandatory for all TVs that are visible in the public areas of businesses, with the goal of equal access to all. Closed captions are necessary to include in your future video content strategy.

3. Flexible viewing options and increases watch time

Another reason why closed captions are vital is because they extend your audience reach. By including captions in your marketing video, you won’t just have deaf or hard-of-hearing people as your audience. Captions also let you tap into a wide variety of audience types. One audience you'll likely capture are those who prefer to watch videos without audio.

According to the American Press Institute, approximately 85% of Facebook videos are viewed without sound. A Facebook study also found that 80% of viewers tended to react negatively if social media videos auto-played with audio. 

When creating marketing videos for your business, it’s recommended that you keep the statistics mentioned above in mind. With closed captions, your video can capture the audience's attention even without audio. This allows them to continue viewing your marketing video, increasing its watch time in the process. It could even help the viewer understand what you’re offering, potentially increasing your business’ sales.

4. They help your video rank higher in Search Engine Optimization

Some video producers continue to wonder why closed captioning is important for videos. The reason for this has something to do with search rankings. Initially, closed captions had no bearing on video ranking for search engine optimization. But with Google’s indexing technology, they could use the text information of captions to rank video content.

Thanks to the aforementioned technology, videos with closed captions tend to rank higher in search results than those without. Therefore, when using videos to promote your services, embedding captions within the video can help it rank higher in search engines. As a result, it could increase your business’ audience, which in turn could bring in more customers.

Closed captions are necessary for improving how searchable and accessible your videos are for customers. However, transcribing your video to create closed captions can be time-consuming. If you're considering including closed captions in your videos, use TranscriptionWing’s closed captioning services to get timely and accurate transcriptions.