Online video content consumption has almost doubled from 2018 to 2021, and people everywhere are watching more video online than ever before.
At the same time, marketers are getting a more positive return on their video investments, whether it's for increasing website traffic, generating leads, driving sales, and even to better understand their global audiences.
So, the million-dollar question: how does your audience want to be reached? Our answer is, without any doubt – video!
In this day and age, video is the fastest growing communication format. 92% of marketers who use video say that it's an important part of their marketing strategy, with 87% reporting a positive ROI from video content investments.
Don’t fall behind the curve – give your audience what they are craving! But once you’ve developed genius marketing videos, how will you adapt them to the different cultural expectations of international buyers?
Don’t fret, we are here to help you reach your global target audiences with high-quality, culturally adapted video marketing!
Regardless of the marketing activities you leverage, quality should always be of utmost concern, and video is no exception.
Video is a trending marketing tactic and your customers expect to see professional, high-quality videos.
Create impactful, exciting scripts to captivate your audience and hold viewers’ attention. Use high-quality equipment and professionals to produce a video that will make your audience feel awestruck.
Poorly written, boring scripts or badly executed videos can immediately turn off potential consumers and cause them to associate poor quality with your brand.
OK, you have created a professional, high-quality video with a catchy script for your audience – great!
You cover a wide range of distribution channels by posting the video on social media, using it in a TV spot, running it as an ad on YouTube and leveraging the script for a radio ad. But, the only audience that will understand or appreciate your creative genius are those who are fluent in your source language, thus alienating your global audience.
Now you need masters of audiovisual translation to dissect your video and make it suitable for your international audiences.
Your first thought: “Just translate the script.” But culturally adapting a video involves much more.
You need to go beyond translation and truly localize the video to align with your target audiences’ cultural norms, expectations and preferences. Do not skip the cultural assessment and localization of your multimedia content.
Effective cultural adaptation is vital for brand protection and message accuracy. We want your video marketing to be a worldwide success; however, your messaging, value proposition and branding elements can all be misconstrued if not properly localized.
High-quality video – check! Translation and localization – check! Subtitles or voice-over? Oh my, there’s more. The chart below provides a high-level breakdown of both to help you understand the difference and select the one that is best for your video.
Subtitles? The distracting words on the bottom of the movie screen? Wrong. A common misconception about subtitles is they are only used for those who are hearing-impaired, but this is not the case. Captions are used to help hearing-impaired audiences experience the sounds in a movie, including spoken words.
Subtitles, on the other hand, are used to translate a video so audiences can understand it in different languages. So, when communicating with your localization partner, be sure you are using the proper terminology to relay your needs for your audiovisual localization. For translating and localizing a video, you need subtitles.
A great perk of using subtitles in marketing videos is the ability to boost search engine optimization (SEO) results.
Deciding to incorporate subtitles in your video will result in higher search rankings on Google and YouTube, thus increasing views and traffic – marketing metric success!
Another reason to use subtitles for your audiovisual localization is to increase accessibility. The vast majority (85%) of Facebook videos are watched without sound, meaning a video with localized subtitles would be fitting for a global Facebook audience.
There are many benefits of choosing to use subtitles; a weakness of only using subtitles is the inability to convey strong emotion, which brings us to your next audiovisual option – voice-over.
Voice-over is a technique that can be a part of your audiovisual translations. It is used to record a different “target language” over the source language.
For digital marketing purposes, choosing voice-over is often much more effective in evoking the emotion you want your target audience to feel. Another reason to use voice-over is viewers retain 95% of a video message they watch and hear compared to retaining only 10% of videos using only subtitles.
Voice-over can be more costly than subtitling, but it can also be more effective. Both methods of localization can be vital when trying to achieve your video-marketing goals.
Not using subtitles may mean you miss out on better SEO results in search engines, and not using a voice-over may mean the emotion in your marketing message won’t resonate as strongly with your target audience.
The fix? Implement voice-over and subtitles. Once you have already translated the script, it shouldn’t cost much more to add subtitles, and using both tactics will truly internationalize your message and give your video the best chance of global success.
Your audiovisual localization success starts with you! Here are some steps you can take before letting your localization partner's audiovisual translation masters work their magic:
Multimedia localization can be complex, especially if you're not aware of all the moving pieces it involves. We hope you now understand how vital localizing your marketing videos is to engage your global target audiences.
If you're missing the right resources to coordinate your video content localization in-house, talk tou our experts - we'll partner with your marketing team to choose the right video localization strategy and turn the process hassle-free.