Why You Need To Use Captions In Your Flight School Videos

Subtitles are often one of the most overlooked things when it comes to a successful flight school video campaign. While traditionally considered only useful for the hearing impaired, it’s quickly become a critical aspect of your video for a much different reason. Silent video… that’s right, Facebook alone is now reporting that 85% of all mobile video views on their platform are viewed silently!

Now imagine simply turning off 85% of your potential flight school student leads.. not pretty right? Subtitles allow you to communicate with this audience of viewers in the way they actually want to learn, and it’s not as hard as you might think.

There are many tools available to you, we use a mix, depending on the specific application.

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Youtube: After uploading a video into your flight school’s channel, you have the option to upload or create subtitles directly on Youtube. This allows you to simply write in the text as you follow along the video, and you can easily adjust the timestamps and order of captions to match your video.

Facebook Ads Manager: By far the easiest and quickest free option if you aren’t a video editor and have access to a Facebook ads account. First, create a new ad by selecting ads manager.. then new campaign… choose the video views objective.. set up any parameters and hit next. Now upload your video as if you were creating an ad. Once the video has finished uploading, select customize video. Now select closed captions and then hit the generate captions automatically button.

After Facebook generate the captions, you have the option to review and edit each line of text to ensure there are no errors. After verifying everything is 100% correct, save the captions. You know have the option to download the .srt file containing the captions.

Final Cut Pro / Adobe Premier: While considered more advanced video editing software, these both allow you to add and edit subtitles directly in the timeline of your project. One of the advantages of using this option, is the ability to “burn in” the subtitles directly to the video. Going this route can be great if your typical demographic is older, as they will still see the subtitles, even if the volume is on/up.

The other benefit of using professional video editing software is the option to customize the captions with different fonts, colors, backgrounds, location, as well as fade in the words as they are being spoken, instead of line by line.

Wistia: Our favorite for anytime you need closed captions, but simply have no time or desire to create them yourself. Wistia is a video hosting and tracking platform that we suggest most of our clients use. One of the great features available with Wistia is that it allows you to request 100% human generated captions with nearly perfect accuracy for the low price of $2.50 per minute at the click of a button.

Interested in creating videos that move the needle for your business? Reach out to our team for a free consultation

Where Should I Host My Flight School Website Videos?

There’s a lot of options out there to upload and host your flight school’s video content. But that doesn’t mean they’re all right for your business. For example, while Youtube is a great free option for a lot of your content, this can be a disaster for embedding videos on your website.

In 2018, Youtube removed the ability to disable the “show suggested videos after video ends” option on all embedded videos. Why should you care? Well due to the nature of the algorithms, competitors videos can and will start showing up as suggested next videos at the end of your videos on your website!

Not cool right? The ability to have complete control over your flight school’s content on your owned channels can make a huge different on your bottom line. I’m sure you wouldn’t sell ad space on your website to a direct competitor, so why would you let them do it for free? Check out FLYTSITES creative services when you’re done!

The Top Video Hosting Platforms For Flight School Websites

WISTIA - A powerful platform for aviation sales & marketing videos

Heatmaps

See how individual viewers interact with your videos.

Engagement graphs

Get insights on audience behavior on an even larger scale.

A/B Testing

Put two videos, or any customizations, head-to-head to find out what’s driving engagement.

Calls to Action (CTAs) and Annotation Links

Encourage your audience to take action right from your videos.

Email collection

Gate your content and drive qualified leads with a sleek email collection form, Turnstile.

Marketing automation integrations

Send your video data to marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.

Turn a collection of videos into an immersive Channel

Easily create a Channel that lives right on your site, ensuring your viewers see more of your content (and none of the competition's).

Brandable player

Pick your player color and upload your logo to match your brand.

Customizable thumbnails

Include a photo, looping video, or text to create eye-catching thumbnails.

Ad-free experience

Play your videos without distractions from ads or suggested video content.

VIMEO - A great option for businesses on a tight budget

Powerful engagement tools let your videos do the marketing work: drive conversions, track engagement, capture leads and grow your business.

Use Showcase to effortlessly create stunning video sites to engage your clients and audience, wherever they are. Create fully branded video marketing pages, embed a playlist on your own existing site, or even turn your video collections into channel-like video destinations for TV (accessible on Roku and Amazon Fire).

Capture emails right from the player, follow up on leads, and build better relationships with your people.

Create custom, mobile-friendly cards and end screens to keep your audience engaged, even after your video ends.

Connect with your audience live and in real time. Create unlimited live events, stream to unlimited viewers, simulcast to your favorite social platforms, and interact with everyone in a live chat.

Replace any video without changing the URL or losing your stats, likes and comments. You can even update your video right from Final Cut Pro X with our macOS app.

Track your video’s performance on Vimeo, on social media, and anywhere it’s embedded, all from one dashboard. With real-time data and long-term reporting, you can spot trends as they’re breaking and for years to come.

Learn exactly how people are watching your videos and (gasp!) when they're dropping off. You can even replace your video with a new, optimized version without affecting the URL, stats, likes or comments.

Find out how people are finding your video, where they live in the world, what devices they’re using, and learn even more about your viewers.

Natively publish your videos to social media and monitor every play, like, share and repost. And compare different platforms side-by-side to see where your audience is thriving and where they need a little more love.

VIDYARD - A feature rich platform built for business

Interact with your flight school prospects while they’re at peak engagement with pre and post-roll calls-to-action like forms, gates, links, and more.

Customize your Vidyard video player to maximize first impressions. Make it yours, embed it anywhere, and of course – it’s responsive across all devices

Turbocharge your demand-gen and account-based marketing (ABM) with video engagement data. With Vidyard you also get free automatic transcriptions, the option to create captions in other languages, and the ability to A/B test up to 16 thumbnails.

Vidyard tracks everything down to how individual users interact with each video. Did they share it? Rewatch one part 10 times? Click the CTA? Use data to optimize your videos or channels and score leads and accounts based on engagement

Schedule reports, control permissions, and push video data into your CRM,
marketing system, and BI tool via best in class integrations.

Personalize your video to deliver a unique, individualized experience to thousands of viewers.

Include personalized video on your landing page to delight your audience, and qualify the most engaged leads

Sales can easily send personalized videos tailored to each lead with the simple push of a button.

Vidyard videos optimize themselves for SEO. As soon as you upload a video, a transcript is created. This is combined with other information like XML sitemaps and then added to your video automatically. Google is going to love you!

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Need high quality sales and marketing videos to help grow your flight school? Reach out to our team of experts to get a free video strategy and learn what videos your business should be creating!