What Is The Increasing Importance of Transcription In The Digital Age

Figure 1: Image Source: Grand View Research - Projected rise in transcription services through 2027.

Business transcription has long been a routine for operations in virtually every sector of the business world. As both the technological and digital revolutions continue to expand in scope, business transcription services will expand and play an increasingly important role in numerous aspects of business such as never been considered before.

What are transcription services and why does your business need them? Both transcription and translation services are increasingly important for business in the digital age in order to expand reach and influence, and for reaching out to new audiences where the competition is lower. Translation and transcription services are important for promoting your business online especially with the use of video transcription services for creating subtitles or closed captioning for YouTube videos.

The importance of transcription does not stop with business marketing however. Whether you are looking for a viable career option with a portable job that will travel with you, or looking to increase the reach and influence of your business, transcription services play an increasingly important role in the digital age.

Transcription Services as a Career Choice in the Digital Age

According to Fortune magazine, nearly 35% of the entire work force in the United States alone, work either full time or part time in the freelance markets. Somewhere around 57 million Americans make a regular living or supplement their income as freelancers online.

Language services are among the easiest means to become involved with freelancing and beginning the journey towards making a living online. Among the many language service providers online are translators, interpreters, writers and others who do transcription or transcribe content online.

Freelancing, as with any career, will inevitably start as little more than a job. It is up to the language service provider to turn that job into a career. Video and audio transcription services are among the easiest way to get into the freelance language careers online.

At first, this may be somewhat challenging, and it will be tempting to accept virtually any transcription service jobs that you can find. This is important when you are just getting started, but it will not help you to build a career providing transcription services.

Make sure that you are always looking for long-term clients who need transcription services and try to build a regular client base. This should be enough transcription work for you to earn enough to pay your bills. Once you are doing enough transcription services to pay your bills, look for additional clients.

This may require you to work a little bit of overtime, but by then you should have both a regular supply of transcription work and a good number of recommendations. As you continue to seek out clients that need transcription services, offer the new clients your same services at a higher rate. In this way you will begin to make a better living providing transcription services to clients at regularly increased rates.

Eventually you should reach a stage where you can actively market your transcription services to existing businesses and other online marketers in many of the same areas as are listed throughout the rest of this article.

When you have reached the stage that you have too many clients for your transcription services, you can hire other freelancers who are seeking to build their career. In this way, you really can turn your freelance transcription services into a full career and create a successful online business.

Transcription Services For Digital Marketing Campaigns

Both video and audio transcription services are an important part of digital marketing for many different reasons. Video translation services can help to provide video influencers with all of the necessary tools to increase their views, interaction and influence from their video marketing efforts. Audio transcription services can provide the basis for multipurposing the marketing content.

If you are providing transcription services online and one of your clients wants a video transcription so that they can create subtitles, take this as an opportunity to upsell them more services that will also serve to increase the efficiency of their video marketing campaign.

The video transcription services can be used to create what are called srt files that are the basis for closed captioning. These files are indexed by the search engines, increasing the number of keywords that the video will rank for, and at the same time provide the basis for a video translation.

The video translation can then be used as the basis for creating srt files in all of the desired languages. This will again increase the ability of the video to rank for the selected keywords and more within the translation as well as the ability to draw viewers to the video even though they do not speak the native language.

The use of simple subtitling or other hard coded captioning services for the video would inhibit the ability of foreign viewers to enjoy the full video experience. The website for HostGator has put together a very nice list of reasons why closed captioning is so great.

More than 80 percent of all videos on Facebook are viewed without sound, and remember, the subtitles are only available in one language and interfere with the ability of video captioning to allow the viewer to enjoy the video all the way through. Closed captioning services alone, on the other hand, will actually increase views and the time people spend watching the videos.

In some cases, most especially when videos are created for public purposes and are taxpayer funded, video transcription services are often required by law. In many cases, especially in larger cities and other areas with a more diverse population, this means that not only are the transcription services more easily marketed by the entrepreneurial types, but there may also be some translation services required at the same time.

Audio Transcription Services and Digital Multipurposing

The idea of multi-purposing website or marketing content is the application by which the same content is used as the basis for different media formats. Audio transcriptions of videos as was just demonstrated, can be used to increase viewers and interaction, but there is much more to it than just that.

Audio transcription services for a podcast can be used to create articles. Document translation services can then be used to make that article available to a much wider audience including foreign languages with tens of millions of viewers where competition is substantially lower as will be shown later in this article.

The same audio transcription can be used to create the basis for slide shows that can be posted on different social media sites where it is very likely that they will be shared by more viewers and help to increase the visibility of the website.

Together, these different media formats can all be compiled and put together to provide you with everything that is necessary to engage in a full, more effective online marketing campaign. Still, there are additional tasks above and beyond the basic transcription services that will become part of the full on marketing efforts online. These should also be considered before marketing these services as part of your new online career.

Transcription and Translation Services to Reduce Online Competition

There are approximately 7000 languages in the world, yet very few of these are represented at all on the internet even today. The Wikipedia website reveals some very interesting statistics, though the starting point is based on rather old studies.

Ironically perhaps, Wikipedia is the most linguistically diverse website on the internet, representing just over three hundred languages. In the current day and age, there are only 11 languages whose content is equivalent to more than one percent of all of the content on the internet.

Website transcription should only be viewed as one portion of this solution, but the transcription can (and should) serve as the basis for a translation that can put your marketing content in front of literally tens of millions of new viewers, with almost no competition depending on your language pair selection and your individual niche marketing online.

There are 85 languages with at least ten million native speakers and 23 languages with more than fifty million speakers. Video transcription services can help to make virtually any YouTube video readily available to literally hundreds of millions of new potential viewers while at the same time entering new markets with little to no competition in some niches.

If you are wondering how somebody can take a freelance transcription job and turn it into a full online career that not only pays well, but has an incredibly large, mostly untapped potential customer base, there is your answer. There are translation agencies and transcription service providers who have literally built international companies out of little more than freelance job opportunities.

While these opportunities will not come easy, they are readily available for those who are willing to put forth the effort. The key now becomes the ability to actively market to and engage with a multilingual marketplace.

Transcription and Translation Services for Multilingual Marketing

As the world becomes increasingly digital, physical borders will not disappear entirely, but they will become much less important in terms of doing business online. If we follow some of the links and look at some of the newer information that was gleaned from the earlier Wikipedia reference, we see even more potentially untapped markets based on language facts of the internet.

There are more than 140 languages that are commonly used on the Facebook platform, more than thirty on twitter and Google (including YouTube) supports around 100 languages. Now considering that you already understand that there are only eleven languages with more than one percent of content on the internet, you should have enough information to begin determining the best ways to use transcription and translation to tap into these markets.

There are many different options available, all of which can be marketed based on the transcription and translation services. In the case of your business, if indeed you have decided to build this into a personal career and international business, you can market not only in English, but in virtually all of the additional languages that are so vastly under represented online.

At the end of the day, while there may be more competition than ever before in the online markets, the strategic and selective use of transcription and translation services can offer an amazing opportunity to those who are willing to make it happen. Between the digital age and the global markets that are only now beginning to open up, it is possible to use communication and bridge many gaps. Transcription and translation services can indeed serve to change the world into a better place, creating a better future today.