Transcription in Content Marketing
Transcription, a process of converting speech to text, plays a major role in many fields. Content marketers are among the professionals who use transcription to improve productivity by spending less time and effort.
Transcription and accessibility
Content marketing
What is content marketing? Oxford dictionary defines content marketing as “a type of marketing that involves creating and sharing online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”
It is a marketing approach that involves creating relevant and valuable content to attract the attention of audiences. The main aim of content marketing is to sell a product or service by attracting those audiences with valuable content that may include blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, and other similar content. Considering that billions of people who have access to the internet use different social media and video-sharing platforms to get information, it creates a huge opportunity for companies to communicate their products or service to much wider audiences than before. Here comes the role of content marketing. While larger companies are able to afford to have marketing teams in different parts of the world and put advertisements on TV, billboards, etc., smaller companies have lesser opportunities due to financial limits. Therefore, content is the most optimal way for the latter to reach more audiences, local or global.
There are a lot of strategies to consider while creating content, and content transcription is among the essential ones. How does transcription helps content marketers in making their content more efficient?
Content transcription, SEO and customer engagement
Content and SEO: these two concepts are related to each other. We use various search engines to gain information on things we are interested in. It was not so long ago that we would turn to books or professionals specializing in specific fields to get information on problems we wanted to solve. While this is still the case for some portions of the population, most people use search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yandex to get fist-hand information on interesting matters for them. All the links that come up on search results are a form of content created for various purposes. All the content creators are interested in their content being ranked, especially on the first page of search engines, since users usually check the links on the first page and don’t bother checking the rest of the results that include millions of different content. This is where SEO plays a major role.
SEO (search engine optimization) is a practice of using several strategies to help your content rank as high as possible on search results. Perhaps the most efficient SEO strategy is creating interesting and valuable content for your target audience. Content creators use relevant keywords, which is one of the SEO strategies, in order to draw the attention of both users and search engines.
Although the internet is full of blog posts, not all the content is in text format. Today, more and more people turn to videos and podcasts as the main source of information. According to YouTube, in 2019, two billion people logged in to the platform every day. These videos and podcasts reach more audiences if there is text with relevant keywords that accompany them. By transcribing the videos, you get the entire text of the audio. While it is possible to use short texts to give a brief description of the video, it isn’t as effective as having the entire text, which includes more keywords and helps the viewers understand the content better. It is a good idea to post video and audio content with their transcripts so search engines can index your keywords. It isn’t possible to search audio/video files for any words, phrase, ideas, at least for now, but the transcript makes it possible.
According to 3playmedia, Liveclicker had a study to compare 37 different pages before and after adding transcripts to their content. According to the results, there was a 16% increase in revenue after adding transcripts.
Transcripts can also be used to create subtitles or closed captions for videos. People from all over the world access internet, and many people prefer watching videos with subtitles or closed captions for various reasons that include difficulties in understanding spoken foreign language, inability to watch videos in noisy backgrounds, etc. Subtitles and closed captions make the videos more engaging, resulting in more consumers deciding to buy your products and services. PLYMedia found that there was a 40% increase in views of videos with captions. They also found that viewers were 80% more likely to watch a video entirely if the video included closed captions.
Transcription and content accessibility
There are millions of people with various forms of impairments and disabilities. In order to use the internet, they need various accessibility tools such as screen readers, speech recognition, and screen magnification software. Audio/video content transcription allows the content creators to communicate their content to people with accessibility issues.
Not all viewers are able to keep up with audio/video content. People with hearing disabilities can watch the video but without any text telling them what is happening in the video, they won’t figure out the context of the video. In that sense, having a transcript alongside the audio/video content is important. It is easier for them to read the entire text and understand the video. Closed captions are more useful in that context since they explain all sounds in recordings, such as dialogues and background sounds like rain, wind, etc.
Posting a transcript on the blog has another important advantage. Today, most browsers are equipped with an automatic translation function that detects the original language of the text and suggests translating it to the language of your choice. By posting the transcript on the blog, you provide a chance for viewers to translate your content into their own language. In other words, you help them get information, and at the same time, the content helps you reach wider audiences.
Transcription and publishing
While publishing blog posts as a hard copy book is easy, audio/video content can only be published as an audiobook. Although audiobooks are getting more widespread, physical copies are still relevant.
By transcribing audio content, you get the entire text of the audio. In that sense, you just need to edit and proofread the transcript and add headings and subheadings, and it is ready to be published. The book can be published physically or in electronic format.