When building customer support ecosystems, more and more companies are embracing video as a key driver of self-service. We recommend that our clients and partners not only distribute their support videos on their own website, but also on a corporate YouTube channel. Currently YouTube is the second largest search engine, and it is owned and built into the largest search engine. This provides you with built-in SEO opportunities that might not exist within your own support pages.
Based on the recommendation that we make to our clients, this article will assume that:
A: You are currently publishing your support videos to a YouTube channel.
B: The majority of your support-video views are organic based, and do not have ad-spend behind them.
Even if you’ve gotten your production costs down to a reasonable $/video (~$1,600 / 3.5 min video), your leadership will still be pushing you to drive the highest ROI possible for your video content. To accomplish this, you need to drive your video views as high as possible. At some point, you will maximize the potential organic views that can be driven through optimization of meta-data, playlists and social sharing. The next logical step is to open up your video content to a new user base.
When talking to our clients, we have found that while many companies are already creating English-language support videos, they do not have the budget or ability to recreate them as Spanish-language videos. This leaves a large percentage of your customers without the ability to easily self-support. Not only this, but studies have shown that Spanish language Americans default to YouTube as their self-support search engine over Google.
If you don’t have the budget for Spanish-language video production, how do you support this customer base with your existing content? The answer is the addition of Spanish Close Captions, and the “Translations” function. While not the perfect customer experience, this will make your videos both searchable, and usable by Spanish speaking customers.
“According to a Nielsen report, the average Hispanic spends more than eight hours viewing online videos every month. That is 1.5 hours more than the U.S. average. Despite having a smaller audience, the engagement on Spanish videos is greater than that of its counterparts. Spanish video content simply seems to “stick” better.” https://digital.gov/2015/09/15/are-videos-in-spanish-the-way-to-go/
A: Spanish Close Captions Allows your customer to turn on the text overlay in their native language.
B: Translations Allows you to add a secondary title and description for the video in Spanish. This essentially doubles the SEO meta data associated with your video.
The best part of this implementation is the cost. There are providers like Caption Depot that can produce Spanish subtitles for around $20 a video depending on your volume. Note: if you’re having them produce your English and Spanish CC files at the same time, the cost is even cheaper. If you consider the fact that the average customer contact for a company is around $6, then it only takes 10 views to achieve a 300% ROI. This makes for some very easy business-case math.
After running a trial with a client we found that over the 1st three months of life, videos with Spanish Subtitles averaged 52% more views per month then those without. Also, Spanish subtitles were used significantly more per video than English subtitles.
Summary:
- To increase your potential video audience: Include Spanish Subtitles & Translations to your videos.
- Translations essentially doubles your video meta data.
- Spanish Closed Captions allows you to drive significantly higher organic views of your video content over the first three months of life.
- Spanish language users default to YouTube as the primary search engine for Support content.
- It only takes 10 views per video to attain a 300% ROI on this work.
Social Service Value 