Unlocking the Benefits of Marketing Transcription

Over 61 million adults in the United States identify as having a disability. That’s a substantial portion of the U.S. consumer base. Failing to consider the needs of customers with disabilities when developing or executing marketing strategies could substantially limit a brand’s reach and cost them a significant amount of business.  

Marketing techniques are constantly evolving, and many marketers have become increasingly dependent upon digital marketing solutions over the last several years. While these resources have the potential to reach larger, more diverse audiences, some consumers may still require certain accommodations to engage fully with certain materials. Marketing transcription is one such accommodation that can provide more equitable experiences to all customers and employees.   

What is marketing transcription? 

Let’s first go over some of the basics of general transcription. Put simply, transcription refers to the process of converting audio to text. Transcription can help to create written records of audio or video information to streamline messaging and improve accessibility. It’s possible to create transcripts from pre-recorded content as well as live communications to offer more equitable messaging for all involved parties.  

Marketing transcription specifically refers to transcription solutions that support marketing materials. Marketing professionals can incorporate transcription into their day-to-day operations in several different ways. Let’s take a look at some of the most common use cases for transcription within the world of marketing.  

Interview transcription for marketing 

Many marketing professionals use one-on-one interviews in their research efforts. Understanding your customer base is one of the most critical components of creating an effective marketing strategy. Also, in-depth interviews allow current, former, and potential customers to offer their unique perspectives on your product or service.  

Transcribing these interviews to text provides a written record of the information shared by the interviewee that’s easy to reference long after the interview concludes. Furthermore, some brands may choose to incorporate the information from these one-on-one interviews into their marketing materials. Perhaps a video recording of portions of the interview will be featured in a televised commercial or social media ad. Other brands may pull specific quotes from these interviews for their print marketing materials like signage and flyers.  

Transcribing these interviews to text makes it that much easier to incorporate the information into other types of content. Transcripts support video interviews that will appear on social media platforms or other media hosting sites. Offering an accurate transcript of this kind of content can help to improve accessibility for viewers who are Deaf or hard of hearing, as well as those with certain neurodivergent conditions.  

Meeting transcription for marketers 

Marketing teams often rely upon several different kinds of meetings during their research and development process. Transcription technology helps capture internal and external meetings, conference calls and more. Offering transcripts of these communications can help to support attendees with disabilities and can provide more comprehensive, easy-to-reference records of the information from a conversation. 

Meeting transcription is also a valuable tool for global workforces and teams with a high volume of remote workers. While virtual communication technology has certainly come a long way, technical difficulties are still a fact of life for telecommuters. Those working from home may periodically find themselves combatting background noise, poor audio quality, or lagging internet connectivity when joining a virtual meeting. Transcription technology – particularly live transcription – can safeguard against these obstacles for more equitable messaging for all participants.  

Video and audio transcription 

Recent studies suggest that roughly 86% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool. Video content can appear on a wide range of platforms in a variety of different markets. As a result, video is a high-value resource for building widespread brand awareness. Transcribing this video content to text can help to ensure the content is accessible to audience members with certain disabilities.  

The same stands for audio transcription. For example, many brands have recently embraced the far-reaching potential of podcasts as a marketing tool. Despite the growing popularity of podcasting, audio-only content poses unique accessibility challenges for those who are Deaf or hard of hearing. Offering written transcripts of podcast content can help to expand a podcast’s audience to include individuals with hearing loss, as well as those with ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions.  

Transcripts can also support individuals who consume video content with the sound off. It may surprise you to learn that an ever-growing number of consumers regularly watch videos on mute. This tendency may be due to the fact that the majority of online video views take place on mobile devices. Audience members are, therefore, often watching when they’re on the go and in public. If a video does not include a readable transcript, the content’s messaging would be entirely lost on any viewer who is unwilling or unable to watch the video with the sound on.  

How can transcription services improve marketing efforts? 

As you can see, transcription technology has the potential to support a wide range of marketing initiatives. In addition to improving the accessibility of marketing content and communications, transcription is also an extremely effective record-keeping tool that allows marketing firms to better maintain and organize their data and other qualitative research information.  

Furthermore, transcribing improves SEO rankings for brands that use audio and video content. If you publicly share the transcript of an audio or video recording online, search engines can crawl the transcript text and incorporate the information into their SEO algorithms. This benefit can substantially boost the value of audio and video content and help to improve a brand’s online visibility.  

Marketing transcription from Verbit  

Verbit is a professional transcription service that offers a wide range of assistive technologies that are tailored to the marketing industry. Verbit’s software platform can be used for a wide range of projects, including meeting transcription, conference call transcription, focus group transcription and more. Verbit also offers real-time transcription solutions in order to support live communications that take place both in-person and online.  

Verbit’s dual approach to transcription combines artificial intelligence with a vast network of human transcribers to efficiently generate accurate final transcripts. Reach out today to learn more about how Verbit’s full suite of assistive technologies can help your brand level up its marketing efforts and demonstrate its dedication to accessibility.