Your content is invisible.
Well, not exactly… it’s invisible to a pretty good portion of the internet.
Let me explain: With the web shifting more towards mobile browsing (along with the multitude of tablets, and other computer-derivatives hitting the market) it is more important than ever to make sure your content is “visible” to everyone.
Most people worry about getting their videos and podcasts into everyone’s screen — but they forget that lots of people can’t even view that content.
- The Stressed Worker – Do you operate a B2B service or product? Well then you know the plight of reaching your prospects through email + the telephone. When it comes to online marketing, the sales “barriers” appear with added intensity. Most employees aren’t allowed to view videos or listen to podcasts while at work. That means without an accompanying text transcription the non-text video or audio is invisible to them!
- The Old-School Mobile Browser – Unfortunately, there’s also a very significant segment of the market that DOESN’T have an iPhone (or otherwise modern web browser) which means lots of video or audio content is completely stripped from web pages. This is another huge issue, because often the end-viewer doesn’t even realize what they are missing out on. This even applies to other multi-media when it comes to advanced phones. (For example, iPhone’s to-date have never accepted flash-based content.)
- The In-Depth Researcher – Research has shown that a large segment of online buyers do not respond well to non-text content. While a video or podcast might allow you to reach a certain segment of the market, don’t neglect the overwhelming majority of the internet that thrives on text content. Many people who are doing in-depth research about a product want text so they can search for certain keywords, copy and paste features into a spreadsheet, or even just skim read for the important stuff.
- The Low Attention-Span – You can’t always rely on your video content to do ALL the selling. Remember that people have an average attention span of what, 8 seconds? Use text in coordination with your other content efforts to ensure that people are engaged with your content. This is the only sure-fire way to keep hold of your prospects attention. If you’re putting in lots of money, time and effort into your content, it’s your responsibility to efficiently disperse that information to the masses. You deserve to be rewarded for all that work — right?
As you can see, there is a huge part of the internet that is blind to your non-text content. Maybe in the future, as hardware and software technology advances, this will become a non-issue… but for the foreseeable future, content (in text-form) is king! So remember to make the absolute most of your content marketing by utilizing a transcription service in the future.
Hopefully these examples have given you a good picture of the “invisible” web surfers that rely on text content. No matter your industry, business, or marketing strategy — you can’t afford to miss out on audio transcription.