Can you remember every single word that was said during your last interview with a guest expert? Probably not, but you’re not alone. Marketers are increasingly adding audio transcription services to their content marketing toolkits. You should too!
More than a third of marketers note speech-to-text as an important tool for their job. Almost 40% of advertisers and marketers use at least two speech-to-text services as part of their workflow. If you’re not using audio transcription services for your recorded expert interviews, you’re missing out on lots of opportunities for creating and amplifying noteworthy content.
Interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) to mine industry gold nuggets for your content is a great way to differentiate your content from the many pages of content online. But when you conduct live interviews without an efficient plan for referencing your recorded conversations, you run the inevitable risk of sinking hours of time and effort into a task you can affordably and quickly outsource to transcription pros.
Transcription is a tool you can use to generate low maintenance content, streamline the content creation process, and utilize your content in ways that benefit you, your expert guest, and your audience.
Audio transcription services help you get the most out of your expert interviews by:
- Saving you time and increasing productivity
- Helping you get to the heart of an interview
- Amplifying your content distribution effort
- Creating an inclusive digital environment
Let’s dive right in and breakdown how transcription services help you get the best out of expert interviews!
Save time and increase your productivity
Interviewing industry experts is perhaps the most valuable part of the content research process. You conduct preliminary research to develop thought-provoking questions. You have an insightful conversation with an SME. Then comes what is arguably the most time-consuming step — transcribing the interview.
You can spend hours transcribing voice recordings to text yourself, or you can outsource this step to an audio transcription service, get an accurate transcription the next day, and divert your time and effort towards other parts of your content creation process.
Don’t feel bad about handing over this step to an outside resource. Close to 80% of marketers say speech-to-text tools increase productivity, while 83% say speech-to-text tools saves them time.
We know what you’re thinking.
“But I can save time by skipping the transcription part and just listen to the interview recording!”
Sounds great at first, but in the end, you’re not saving any time at all. If you try and listen to an audio recording of an interview without accompanying text as a reference, you may find yourself having to constantly rewind the audio to piece together important information. If you have a transcription of the interview, you can easily scan the document and extract key parts of the conversation to reference in your content.
Free up some time and improve productivity by outsourcing the most tedious task in the interviewing process to transcription services and tools.
Stay present and get to the heart of your expert interviews
You don’t want your guests to remember you as the interviewer who had their head down throughout the whole conversation or frequently asked them to repeat themselves because you were busy taking notes! Perhaps this is why in 2020, 49% of people who do research rely on transcription services and tools to assist with notetaking during interviews.
Knowing that you’ll have a transcribed copy of the interview you’re leading allows you to focus on what your guest says and gives you the space to have a more human conversation. If you’re focused on jotting down notes throughout the duration of the interview, you might miss something thoughtful your guest said. You also risk disrupting the flow of natural conversation. You ask your prepared questions robotically and you aren’t able to engage as an active listener, so you lose the opportunity to delve deep into what your guest is talking about.
The assurance that your interview is documented and available to you in text form allows you to have a more natural conversatio which puts both you and your guest at ease. When your guest is comfortable, you’re able to go further than the surface level and get a depth of information.
A great memory isn’t necessary
Unless you’re some sort of memorization champion, an interview transcript is always going to be more accurate than your memory. A transcription of your interview guarantees that the most accurate information makes it into your content instead of a “fact” you misremembered. As a marketer, you want to provide your audience with valuable information that is relevant and factual. For the times you’re turning an expert interview into a piece of long-form content or social media copy, it’s important to have a transcription to refer back to for accuracy.
Improve your interview skills
Transcripts can also help you become a better interviewer. Reviewing transcripts gives you the chance to take a step back and see how you speak. Do you use way too many filler words? A few too many “ummms” may make you seem less confident when interviewing an expert. Are you interjecting a bit much and cutting your interviewee off before they have a chance to complete their thought? You may not realize you’re doing it during the interview, but a readthrough of the interview transcript will reveal if you interrupt your guests while they’re speaking.
Transcripts give you the opportunity to give your full attention to every conversation and improve the interview experience for both you and your expert guest.
Amplify content distribution
With the boom of audio and video content in recent years, most marketers publish their expert interviews in the form of a podcast (audio/video) or video live streams on social networking and video conferencing platforms. However, many marketers are only converting 25% or less of their content to text.
Don’t be one of the marketers who isn’t taking advantage of the potential for massive growth with speech-to-text content. You spend hours researching and conducting a great interview. You want to make sure your content gets noticed.
Transcribing audio and video content lets you repurpose your content in a different way and ensures that your content is shared with the widest audience in your industry.
How? Good ol’ SEO.
Increase your SEO efforts with interview transcripts
There are two main ways to utilize SEO practices with transcriptions.
1. Use podcast audio transcription services to add transcripts to your site
By uploading transcripts of your podcast episodes to the show notes on your blog, you make Google’s job of indexing your site much easier. Google has started to index podcast audio and add podcast episodes to SERP for specific queries, but the search engine giant is still most efficient at indexing text. As you would with any blog content, be sure to include headlines in the transcripts to demarcate transition points in the copy.
Giving Google text versions of your podcasts and video interviews to index may help bump you up on the SERP and increase organic traffic to your site.
2. Include live transcriptions on your video content
Hosting webinars, video conferences, or uploading video interviews? Consider including live transcriptions (closed captioning) to your video content. Without closed captions, Google is only able to index your video title and any information you include in the video description. With closed captions, Google is able to index more text content associated with your video which in turn increases your keyword depth. Remember to include relevant keywords in your video script (and consequently your subtitles) so as to not miss out on any opportunities for people to discover your video content through search.
Cultivate an inclusive and accessible digital environment
Your audience can benefit from the expert knowledge shared during your interview, but they’ll only engage with your content if it’s convenient and accessible for them. On most social networks, many users have silent autoplay as the default setting for videos, and not many people switch off that setting and turn the sound on. According to Facebook, 80% of users react negatively when a video unexpectedly plays loud audio. Up to 85% of Facebook videos are watched without the sound.
Some people don’t want to listen to audio or video content because they’re in a shared office environment or working from home with partners or children. Having live transcriptions on your videos from the first second and throughout the video grabs people’s attention and keeps them from scrolling past your content.
Some of your webinar attendees may experience sound issues during the video conference. Live captioning your webinar saves attendees with audio issues time because they still get the spirit of the conversation by reading the closed captions and don’t have to scramble to solve their sound problem immediately.
For users in your audience who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing, live transcriptions make your content more accessible and signal to your audience that inclusivity is important to your brand.
Additionally, you can include audio and video subtitles in languages other than English and make your content accessible to an international audience.
Live transcription and subtitles allow people to engage with content in a way that is most convenient and accessible to them which increases the consumption rate of your content.
Our favorite audio transcription service – Rev
Here at InspireFirst, we love talking to people — a lot. We chat with clients about strategy, we discuss marketing wins and best practices with guests on our podcast, and we speak with our clients’ customers to write impactful stories. With all that talking, we need a way to document our conversations for future reference. We count on Rev transcription services to provide us with accurate transcripts of all our interviews.
We could wax poetic about how Rev is one of the best transcription services, but here’s a quick rundown of why we love Rev.com:
- It’s affordable at $1.25 USD per audio minute
- They deliver transcripts to you in 12 hours
- Rev transcripts are incredibly accurate – when ranked among the leading transcription services, Rev came out on top with 84% accuracy, outperforming Google
- There’s no extra charge for audio files with multiple speakers or speakers with accents
- Rev has different variations of services: video captions, subtitles in multiple languages, advanced organizational features, and more
- For a super quick turnaround, you can use Rev’s AI tool Temi
If transcriptions are a critical piece of your content marketing strategy or you think utilizing a speech-to-text tool will help streamline your expert interviews, try Rev.com.
Make the most out of your expert interviews with transcription
Video and audio content are growing in popularity, but if you leave text to the side, you’re missing out on a high-potential opportunity to level up our content creation and distribution process.
Audio transcription services help you:
- Invest your time in other areas of productivity
- Get to the true essence of what you and your expert guests discuss
- Widen your audience with improved SEO for audio/video content
- Create content that everyone can find value in
Make your job easier and more impactful with audio transcription services.
