Today we look at how to boost ROI or ROAS across your video production lifecycle, and how to make structural decisions which will pay off over a long time frame.

ROI or ROAS: Which One Should I Use?

It’s actually a pretty messy question, but here are the basics.

ROI: Return on Investment

Getting a definition is the starting point, and according to the smart folks at Investopia:

Return on Investment (ROI) is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI tries to directly measure the amount of return on a particular investment, relative to the investment’s cost.

Woo!

ROAS: Return on Ad Spend

The good people at https://www.bigcommerce.com.au/ have taken a pretty good approach here:

Return On Advertising Spend, (ROAS), is a marketing metric that measures the efficacy of a digital advertising campaign ROAS helps online businesses evaluate which methods are working and how they can improve future advertising efforts.

Bigger Woo! But what does it mean? Essentially, Revenue/Cost or (Revenue-Cost)/Cost.

No biggie.

So ROI or ROAS?

Simple rule of thumb, for total spend go with ROI, for campaign specific spend go with ROAS.

It can get a lot more complex. But this is good enough for right now.

If you want to know the additional complexity, do research on how to include:

• Partner/Vendor Costs
• Affiliate Commission
• Clicks/Impressions Costs

Simple Marketing Funnel vs Simple Business Funnel

Okay - this is super basic, but important for the next bit. This is what a basic marketing funnel looks like, contrasted to a business funnel.

… And It’s Implications For Video

So what does it all mean?

• Video should be thought of through the prism of either ROI or ROAS. Thinking it terms of a generic ‘awareness’ is not going to cut it.
• Unless if a for-fun project (and you should definitely make videos for fun too!), the big question is what is the expected return of the content spend?, followed up by how to measure this return accurately?

This is actually a pretty deep topic but the focus here is on using subtitling, or video transcription, to boost ROI - that is what you are hear to read about, isn't it!

Boosting Your Return on Video Spend / Return on Content Spend

So we wave our hands magically and assume you have a content spend plan and can measure its returns.

Once here, there are 3 ways to boost the return on video, in no particular order:

• Increase engagement frequency
• Increase engagement duration
• Increase audience size

Lets look at these in a bit of detail.

Increase Engagement Frequency for Video

This is primarily applicable to video advertising: from short sub 5, 10, 20, 30 second videos up to maybe about 2 minutes.

As an example, these videos are rolled out in video campaign ads, and they play at the start, middle and end of your favourite YouTube videos.

Within YouTube there are three different types of ads; Bumper Ads, TrueView in-stream non-skippable ads and TrueView in-stream skippable ads.

These are also available in LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram TV.

Here, subtitles are best used as Open-Captions. Why? Engagement goes up heaps!

Research shows that 92% of consumers view videos with the sound off. So in social channels where video auto-plays muted, you really, really need open captions to engage with the viewer.

Increase Engagement Duration for Video

So this is primarily for longer videos, 5 minutes to 10 minutes long which work on the principle of video SEO.

This means you expect your audience to search for specific terms in YouTube and your video comes up in the YouTube Search bar.

The first thing you can do is seed keywords into your title and description.

The second one, and this is a biggie - add subtitles in properly to get the coveted CC tag on your video!

To get the subtitles file for upload into YouTube, use the Download SRT button. For more advanced use-cases, use the Download VTT button.

For a more detailed description of the process, read this blog post or try the VideoTranslator App.

The point is, with the SEO, people will find your content long after your initial campaign is complete.

Increase Audience Size

Phew! This can be a lot of work. But we’re basically done!

To increase the audience size we are going after (1) accessibility, and (2) other languages.

Use the Open Captions as described above to increase accessibility. Who is this aimed at?

Increase Audience Size - Accessibility

People who are hearing impaired. Do you really care about deaf folk? After all how big of an audience are they?

You should care, because it’s the right thing to do.

But also, older people who may be is various stages of hearing loss - these people potentially have money to spare, so make it easy for them to spend it on your products!

Additionally - parents, especially parents of young babies.

Really? Yes - lots of people use open captions when they have babies. See, if your child is asleep, you want to watch content without waking the baby up!

These parents get used to watching content with open captions as a result.

Go on, be nice to parents everywhere…

Increase Audience Size - Internationalization and Localization

This is super useful if the majority of your non-English (as an example) audience is bilingual or multilingual.

What you need to do here is add additional title, description and subtitles files into your video.

How do you get these? Use the Action -> Translate and select your preferred language to translate to in the VideoTranslator App.

Conclusion

We used the VideoTranslator to obtain (1) subtitles or transcripts, (2) an open-caption version, and (3) title, descriptions and subtitles in different languages, for our video content.

The key points are:

• Boost engagement frequency for shorter video adverts, and engagement duration for longer bits of content using Video SEO tactics described above.
• Distribute your content to a wider audience, and be nice to your parents!

Please connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook for any comments, questions, or just to keep up to date with the work we do!

If you are interested in trying out our technology, please try our platform or drop us an email at hello@videotranslator.ai.