Adding Subtitles to Your Video Marketing Campaigns

“Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”

-Chris Tucker (Rush Hour 1998)

Those who remember this iconic line from the movie are probably smiling at the moment because you remember just how funny this scene is or you were reminded of your age!

While this scene from the movie is funny, it is not when you are doing your video marketing. Imagine promoting your business in a video and you became a Chris Tucker talking to a Jackie Chan, It’s no fun!

In this article, we will talk about 3 reasons why you should add subtitles to your video marketing campaigns.

• Scaling your business internationally with subtitles
• Improve user watch time
• SEO and Google Ranking

Scaling your business internationally with subtitles

If you are a business owner wanting to conquer the world but you can’t speak every language available, then your best bet is to add subtitles to your videos. First, you need to figure out where your international audience is located then you can capitalize on that market.

Adding subtitles to scale internationally can be done in 2 ways

• Adding subtitles in English

A big chunk of the world speaks English but not everybody is very good at it and sometimes people understand what they read more than what they hear.

• Adding subtitles in your audience’s native language.

If you are someone who wants to scale your business internationally, it is inevitable to reach out to non-English speaking countries. It is a no-brainer to add your subtitles in your audience’s native language to appeal more to that said market.

Improve user watch time

Studies show that 80% of people are more likely to view and watch a video to its completion if it has subtitles.

Subtitles and captions catch the viewer’s attention and in turn watch your videos for longer periods and since your CTAs (Call to action) are normally towards the end of your video it increases your chance of growing your customer base.

SEO and Google Ranking

Yes! Adding subtitles to your videos helps improve your ranking in SERPs.

When Google analyzes videos, it only crawls for external information (number and view duration, engagement rate, length of the video …) without really considering the video itself which sucks if you are the creator of the video since your work is not considered relevant in this subject.

But by adding subtitles you are making the contents of your video readable by Google provided that they were added as an external resource and format (.SRT, .VTT) this way these subtitles will send Google information to judge the keyword relevance of your content.

Adding subtitles is like every video marketer’s dream, being able to reach out to more people, get people to be engaged more, having a higher chance of growing your customer base, and rank higher on SERPs. What more can you ask for?

But how do you add subtitles to your videos?

Well, there are a few ways to go about adding subtitles to your videos.

• Editing the subtitle in the video

This is a very inefficient way of adding subtitles to your video, you need to watch the video and be mindful of the timings, and since the subtitle is not added as an external resource it is not going to help you with your SEO ranking.

• Adding .SRT

There are video editors online that do this very quickly. All you have to do is to select the video you want, add your SRT file, and then hit export.

• Auto transcription/Subtitle

One problem with making subtitles is that it can be expensive if you are outsourcing it.

Fortunately, there are tools available online that can do auto transcription and auto subtitles and they are fairly easy to use as well.