Captions that keep viewers glued to your video — the 3 components you need

Having captions on your short-form videos is now table stakes.

Not only are captions essential for accessibility and inclusion, but they also now play a huge role in keeping viewers engaged, increasing watch times, and maximizing a video's impact.

To get even more value out of them, here are the 3 key components your captions need to keep viewers' attention:

Accurate words
Good design
Engaging animation

Make your transcriptions accurate (the words)

Captions should be accurate—both in how the words are spelled, as well as when they appear on the screen. Having inaccurate captions can erode your video's professionalism as well as your brand's credibility.

Captioning is a huge pain point for us, and accuracy in the captions is important.

Philip Henry, Video Producer at Boston Consulting Group

So how do you get accurate transcripts for your video? Here are 3 different ways to turn your video's dialogue into text.

Platform-native services

Platform-native services like Instagram and TikTok now offer auto-generated captions for quick and low-quality videos, but they often require manual editing within the app.

The smaller screen space can make it challenging to edit multiple videos' worth of captions, so if you're posting more than 3 videos a week on a single platform, that manual time and frustration from editing on your phone will add up.

Since these platforms create only burned-in captions, you also won't be able to export a transcript to then repurpose into written content.

An AI-assisted transcriber will save you the most time and money in getting accurate captions.

Paid services

Paid services like Rev provide more accurate transcriptions, but they can be costly. Philip Henry's team at BCG sometimes uses a paid service, but they can only use it for projects with a budget.

For everything else, I have to use a video editing software and manually create captions, adding 30+ minutes to my editing process.

Philip Henry, Video Producer at Boston Consulting Group

AI-powered services

AI-powered services like Capsule offer a fast and cost-effective solution, combining AI transcription with manual adjustments.

Capsule's video editor uses AI to automatically transcribe your video. Like any AI tool, it won't be perfect, and you'll have to verify and edit some spellings. But to save you time with this, Capsule will automatically highlight any words it detects as "low-confidence" transcriptions.

Capsule uses AI to auto-generate a transcript, which you can then edit and automatically generate captions for your video.

Bonus transcript tip

The benefit of being able to generate a transcript from your video is that you can repurpose that text into multiple marketing assets. Simply copy and paste the text into ChatGPT and ask for ideas. Here's a prompt you can use as a template:

You're the CMO of an enterprise SaaS company that makes project management tools for sales teams. Summarize the 5 main points from this video transcript. Then from those 5 main points, create 10 different blog post ideas, video scripts for 5 short-form videos for LinkedIn, and an email campaign.

Make your captions stylized (the look)

Now that you've got accurately spelled and timed captions, you'll want to make them look good and easy to read.

The 3 styling components you should consider for your captions are:

Font
Colors
Positioning

When designing your captions, choose easy-to-read fonts and high-contrast colors that align with your brand. If you won't be using a background color on your captions, make sure the font includes a drop shadow, outline, or other way for the words to stand out against the video.

The White House uses custom, branded captions and text graphics to create high-grade videos that increase comprehension, viewer retention, and brand recognition.

In Capsule, your brand or design team will take care of all of these design decisions for you. Every brand-approved graphic and caption template will be pre-loaded into Capsule and ready for you to use so you can focus on creating and publishing.

Garrett Genest, Director of Growth at Kudos, appreciates how quick and easy it is to use designs within Capsule:

I like that I don't need to say, "Hey design team, can you spend a day doing this video for me?" Instead, anyone can just do it.

Garrett Genest, Director of Growth at Kudos

Capsule lets design teams customize the caption font, font color, background color, highlight color, and position so anyone making videos can stay within brand guidelines.

When positioning your captions, be sure to leave a margin so they don't get cut off or covered up by each platform's navigation or playback menus. Capsule does this work for you by adding a few limitations on where you can place your captions. That way, no matter where you post your video, your captions will be visible.

Make your captions animated (the feel)

The last component of your captions is the animation—how the words actually come onto the screen.

Here are a few of the most popular styles of caption animations and an example of each:

Displaying a section of words at once ("pop-on")
Highlighting one word at a time ("Karaoke-style")
Adding one word at a time
Displaying one word at a time

Displaying a section of words at once ("pop-on")

The "pop-on" is the most common and basic style of caption animation, where sections of text appear all at once.

Highlighting one word at a time ("Karaoke-style")

The green highlight on each word as it's spoken helps viewers follow along with the text and stay engaged with the video.

Adding one word at a time

Instagram's auto-generated captions fade each word onto the screen to give the text more of a rolling effect.

Displaying one word at a time

Each animation style conveys its own tone and energy, so be mindful of the type of video you're creating and what your brand goals are.

Slapping on "Hormozi" captions without thinking is lazy and won't move the needle. You need to edit your captions in a way that's congruent with the market and your brand.

Tiger Joseph, Social Video Strategist

To make your captions work harder, include all 3 components

Captions of any kind are proven to increase viewer engagement. But to get the most out of your captions, they should be accurate, stylized, and animated.

With Capsule you can quickly create accurate captions and keep the stylization and animation exactly within your organization's brand guidelines.