Anyone who’s received advice about online marketing in the last few years will have been told about the importance of adding video to your mix. Whether it appears directly on your website, on your Facebook page or even just on You Tube, a video is the way to get Google to love you.
Of course, using video has to be about more than just improving your Google page ranking. You will want to communicate your message with interesting, fresh content, promote a new product, engage with existing and potential customers. That’s fine if your entire target audience speaks your language, but what if you want to reach further? What if you want to attract a global audience, in places where your language is at best a second language and often not spoken at all? (According to the British Council, one in four people in the world speak English to some level. That’s a lot, but what about the other 75%?). In this case, you need to add subtitle translations to your video.
You may have already addressed the language issue for certain of your other materials. Perhaps in your brochures, manuals and website – hopefully with a top-quality professional translation – but video is not text, so needs to be approached slightly differently.
Subtitles and captions on your online videos are a great way to engage with a wider audience. They instantly make your videos accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing population, which numbers more than three million people of working age in the UK alone.
Once subtitles are translated into multiple languages, the world is your oyster. Adding professional subtitle translations to your video means that all of your global communications can be in the first language of your target audience. No need to have a translated webpage with a video only in English.
With recent advances in translation technology, inconsistencies between video and written text are no longer a worry. Your preferred translation supplier is able to access all existing translations, regardless of whether they were originally intended for print or video. Consistent terminology and branding are ensured because subtitle translations can now be integrated into the main translation memory tools. The advantages are obvious for businesses of any size.
Finally, back to Google. Subtitles are text which Google can index, so if your corporate video subtitles are keyword-rich like the rest of your online content, you will only help your SEO effort.
Get in touch for more information on how STAR UK can help you add value to your video content.