Using Closed Captions to Boost Your Video Marketing Campaign

Closed Captioning for YouTube Videos is about more than just making certain that people with hearing impairments have access to your videos. In fact, no matter what type of YouTube marketing campaign is being undertaken, video translation, in general, has many benefits. YouTube is the second most popular site on the Internet, second only to Google.

With approximately thirty million unique visitors daily and an estimated five billion videos being viewed every day, YouTube plays an important role in the work of every internet marketer in the world, or at least should. 

According to research conducted by the TechMagnate website, closed captioning on YouTube videos increases viewership between thirteen and fourteen percent. It further increases audience participation including the number of “Likes”, “Shares” and viewer comments for each video being tested. (See the attached illustrations) Closed caption files are also indexed by the Search Engines, including the internal YouTube Search Engines and the external Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. 

This means that videos with closed captioning will show results for more keywords and be more easily seen both on-site and off-site. This is because    YouTube videos with closed captioning included will be recommended more often, not only on the YouTube Website but will also enjoy a higher SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) boost on the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. 

The end result is an increase in the number of direct views and an increase in the number of times the YouTube marketing campaign videos will be recommended by YouTube on-site, and the number of times they will be seen on the SERP, all leading up to an increased number of viewers and increased audience participation.

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For those people working to earn a living from YouTube video marketing, those numbers all add up to an increased audience, an increased profit margin and even an increased potential for paid sponsorship for their YouTube video marketing campaign. So how does closed captioning for YouTube videos accomplish all of that? 

What is the Difference Between Closed Captions and Subtitles and Is It Important?

The differences in the battle of subtitles vs captions are subtle but very important. Subtitles generally encompass nothing more than verbal communications within a video. Closed captioning within a video includes background noises such as the theme music, or “winds whispering softly through the trees” and all the other sounds and activities that someone without sound may miss.

Since all of these sounds have likely been incorporated to enhance the experience for the YouTube viewing audience, their presence is, or should at least, be very relevant. 

The top YouTube vloggers and other YouTube influencers have upwards of sixty, seventy and even over one hundred million followers. (YouTube influencer Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg surpassed one hundred million subscribers in August 2019) These people did not attain that level of success by accident.

The psychology of sales and marketing is a tricky business, often involving personal habits and reactions that people are largely consciously unaware of experiencing. There is no need to “translate” the visual cues that have been intentionally included, but without even a hint of the audio aids included in the video, the marketing impact of the YouTube video can easily be lost. 

The primary purpose of using closed captioning rather than merely using subtitles within the video itself is to ensure that literally, all the viewing audience will receive the full impact and benefit of the videos being watched.

It does not matter if the viewing audience has a hearing impairment or merely has their sound turned off. Each and every viewer will still receive the full benefit of a YouTube marketing campaign video with the select use of video translation and closed captioning on all of their YouTube video content. 

How Does Closed Captioning Benefit My YouTube Marketing Campaign?

“A survey of U.S. consumers found that 92% view videos with the sound off on mobile and 83% watch with the sound off.” according to a new report from Verizon Media and ad buyer Publicist Media. This was found to be due to numerous reasons, including people watching YouTube videos at work, people-watching in restaurants where disturbing other patrons was a concern, and even people watching videos in noisy surroundings such as on the trains or subways. 

In short, closed captioning is not just for YouTube viewers with hearing impairments. Closed captioning allows for all of these people perusing the YouTube videos to do so while still enjoying the full experience of the video, even without sound.

Add in the potential to increase YouTube views and audience participation through the selective utilization of video translation, and it should be easy to see just how beneficial closed captioning really is for YouTube vloggers and internet marketers alike. 

Research from the VideoNitch.com website reveals that “You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population)”. For internet marketers who are selling informational products or for YouTube influencers, video translation and closed captioning in foreign languages can open up entirely new markets with little or even no direct competition. 

Imagine a store owner being able to open up a brand-new store in a brand-new market and being the only one selling a desirable product to a hungry customer base. This is a very real potential for YouTube vloggers and influencers and even for people selling informational products online. This is especially true when those informational products come in the form of videos or easily translated informational content.

Is the potential for opening up entirely new markets with virtually no competition worth the small amount of dedication and resources necessary for professional video translation services? 

How Do I Translate a YouTube Video and How Does it Help?

Whether a comparatively simple machine translation will suffice, or whether it may be better to engage certified video translation services or other certified and professional interpreters or translators, will depend on the video, the product, and the underlying intent of your YouTube marketing campaign. 

For someone who is working on learning different ways to boost marketing campaigns online, such as those in the TikTok niche, or those showing videos of “fails” there may be very little benefit from closed captioning or video translations.

For those YouTube vloggers and other influencers who simply rely on their own unique content, or those utilizing YouTube video marketing campaigns to sell informational products, they may well stand to gain an increased revenue stream from the use of translating video and audio files into closed captioning. These translations should ideally be for both their primary languages and some other more common languages found on YouTube. 

Political pundits on YouTube may not enjoy any great benefit from translating their content into foreign languages. They may, however, receive increased viewership and audience participation by having their YouTube videos transcribed and having professional closed captioning as part of their YouTube video marketing campaign.

People who follow some of the more controversial pundits on YouTube may not want others in the vicinity to know what they are watching, and like so many people, even watch speeches or “listen” to interviews with the volume turned off completely. 

For the person using a YouTube video campaign for information marketing, the professional translation services available offer many benefits well beyond the mere fourteen or fifteen percent of increase views on their YouTube videos. This is where the real opportunity to increase the profits from YouTube marketing begins to show for the more entrepreneurial internet marketers. 

Are Machine Translation or Professional Translation Services Better for my YouTube Marketing Campaign?

As was previously noted, there are some cases where there is no real need to use video translation services to increase views or audience participation on YouTube. However, for the professional internet marketer engaged in any kind of informational YouTube marketing campaign, the use of professional translation services and the inclusion of closed captioning should not even be an option. Professional Translation Services is an integral ingredient in the recipe for the success of any informational marketing campaign online. 

One surprisingly often overlooked fact about human nature, is that it is common across virtually all humanity.  The same principles that work for sales in American markets tend to work equally well in the Hispanic markets, especially among those of a similar socioeconomic and sociopolitical class of people.

Translate Spanish to English, translate English to Spanish, translate Russian to German even, and oddly enough, the same information that is valuable in English is just as valuable in Spanish or in German or even in Russian or Polish or Greek translations. 

A truly enterprising internet marketer conducting even something so (comparatively) simple as a YouTube affiliate marketing campaign, could easily form a joint venture with the information or product owner, get the information professionally translated through professional document translation services, and have virtual (if not complete) exclusivity in an entirely open market, hungry for that information.

Indeed, the very reason that professional translation services are so good for your YouTube marketing campaign is that they are equally beneficial to your profitability and the return on investment (or ROI) for your internet marketing efforts.