Case Study: Transperfect | Customer Stories

Case Summary

GlobalLink from TransPerfect provides B2B language services to facilitate international business communication. GlobalLink NEXT is the largest company event where all parts of the GlobalLink equation come together: users, product developers, prospects, support staff, and salespeople.

For us, corporate events aren’t just an opportunity to capture keynotes and B-Roll of the event itself. They enable us to take advantage of all those parts of the equation being in the same place at once, and leverage that opportunity to create content that serves marketing and sales.

We launched a Springboard to understand the greatest needs for video content for GlobalLink NEXT as an event series, GlobalLink NEXT in DC, and GlobalLink as a product. We determined that our strategic event video package, The Ballroom C, would provide TransPerfect with the most valuable content ahead of, during, and after the conference.

The Ballroom C includes three phases of content:

• Phase One – video to promote your event ahead of the event
• Phase Two – video to deploy during the event
• Phase Three – video created from footage captured at the event

For this GlobalLink Next initiative, we executed Phase One and Phase Three.

The first phase of our strategy included the promotional video content we created leading up to the event, which you can learn about in Part One of this case study.

The next phase focused on creating videos from the footage we captured in DC while GlobalLink NEXT was taking place in September 2018, including speaker presentations and customer stories. In the end, our strategy enabled us to take advantage of the GlobalLink customers and partners who attended the event to deliver multiple story-based campaigns.

Challenge

GlobalLink, as a product, provides B2B language services to facilitate international business communication. GlobalLink NEXT is an invitation-only event where all the parts of the GlobalLink equation come together: users, product developers, prospects, support staff, and salespeople.

Part Two of our roadmap focused on capturing the Speaker Presentations at GlobalLink Next, as well as creating a series of Customer Stories: testimonial videos from existing GlobalLink customers who were willing to share their personal experiences using the product. The coordination of these video shoots presented unique challenges in their own right – and required another strategy altogether to execute successfully.

Solution

First, we identified the key personas that TransPerfect needed to target through their Customer Stories video campaign: Prospects, Existing Clients, and Independents (e.g., consultants).

We determined the distribution channels through which we would publish and promote the video content once it was produced. This included TransPerfect’s website, as well as their most relevant – and rapidly growing – social media followings: LinkedIn, which saw a 52% increase in followers YOY; Facebook, which saw a 34% increase YOY; and, of course, YouTube, which saw a 173% increase in subscribers YOY.

Customer Stories

We wanted to leverage the perspective of existing GlobalLink users to address potential concerns from new prospects. It wouldn’t do us much good to interview any random GlobalLink user we came across in the conference hall; rather, we strategically selected our subjects ahead of time. To achieve this, we identified the users who could provide the most value for our target prospects, such as leaders from the gaming industry and customer support experts.

Prior to the event, we pre-interviewed our subjects to help us get the full story. This is an essential, but often missed, element of creating compelling customer story-based content. The pre-interview lets us design the right questions that elicit the right answers to craft the story we want to tell, while also making the actual on-camera interview process more efficient. We also began the process of securing releases from the subjects and their companies; it is critical to get permission from the company to use footage of their employees, even if the subjects themselves sign your release.

The worst time to uncover the story is when you sit a subject down in front of the cameras for the interview. Often times, production companies will not consider this and end up scrambling on the day to find subjects and pull something insightful out of them; by eliminating this element, we made the interviews much more focused and the content more valuable.

On the day of the event, our production crew set up a green screen studio in a meeting room down the hall from the main conference room which gave us more opportunities to separate our subjects from the background, and introduce motion graphic elements. We did this largely because we all know how boring talking heads can be, especially as they describe the technical aspects of their niche industry. The producers who conducted our pre-interviews directed these interviews, as well, so they knew exactly which questions to ask to draw out the right story.

Often, you’ll see B-roll covering these shots – but we didn’t have the luxury of capturing B-roll. Motion graphics gave us the ability to create dynamic, engaging, and most importantly, educational backgrounds during the post-production phase.

Ultimately, the production was intricately designed to help us create the most and the best content we could in one single day, thus ensuring a higher return on investment for the client.

During post-production, the producer who conducted the pre-interviews and on-camera interviews reviewed the footage and transcripts to identify the most valuable sections of the testimonials. Working with our editor, the team was able to build powerful customer stories that served the goals laid out in the early stages of our strategy. Last but not least, our animators developed a consistent animation style to tie all of the videos together into a coherent campaign.

Speaker Presentations

We believe that our clients own the thought leadership content presented at their events, which is why it was so important to capture the Speaker Presentations throughout the GlobalLink conference. So while we conducted our testimonial interviews throughout the day, our stage team captured the content being delivered in the various ballrooms.

Although we conducted pre-interviews for our customer stories, we wanted to be flexible enough to capture some additional information during our interviews if opportunities presented themselves. We had a producer taking notes during each presentation in case one of our subjects delivered new insights while on stage, giving us the ability to ask them questions related to those new discoveries during the testimonial interview.

For example, during his presentation, one speaker compared the differences between “life before TransPerfect and life after TransPerfect.” His concise, pointed summary of how TransPerfect changed his business for the better was something we knew we wanted to capture, as he would already be prepared to discuss it on the fly.

Over the course of the conference, we filmed nine presentations, with the expectation of delivering five final Speaker Presentation videos that featured the “best of the best” content. This was determined by identifying the speaker content that was highly engaging and expertly delivered.

Prior to the event, we pre-interviewed our subjects to help us get the full story. This is an essential, but often missed, element of creating compelling customer story-based content as it lets us design the right questions that elicit the right answers that help us craft the story we want to tell. The worst time to uncover the story is when you sit them down in front of the cameras for the interview; you may miss golden opportunities to craft the perfect story if you don’t do this ahead of time.

On the day of the event, our production crew set up a green screen studio in a conference room which gave us more opportunities to separate our subjects from the background, and introduce motion graphic elements. We did this largely because we all know how boring a talking head can be, especially as they describe the technical aspects of their niche industry.

Often, you’ll see B-roll covering these shots – but we didn’t have the luxury of capturing B-roll. Motion graphics gave us the ability to create dynamic, engaging, and most importantly, educational backgrounds during the post-production phase. The studio team captured pre-designed interviews while our stage team captured the content being delivered in the various ballrooms.

In other words, the production was carefully planned to enable us to capture more video on the day, thus ensuring a higher return on investment for the client. During post-production, we collaborated with animators and editors to develop a consistent animation style to tie all of the videos together.

Result

In the end, we delivered over 60 assets, including nine full-length Customer Stories videos plus .gifs, thumbnails, and cutdowns.

TransPerfect created a Customer Stories page on their website featuring each of the testimonial videos. Each video is paired with a lead generation contact form.

In addition, these videos are available for their sales team members to use in their cadence to help move prospects – and existing clients interested in new TransPerfect services – further along in the sales cycle. The videos offer social proof to prospects in similar verticals as the customers featured in the campaign.

In July 2019, TransPerfect announced that it has hit a new sales milestone for the company: $357 million in the first six months of the year, or a 6 percent increase over the same period in 2018. In fact, their second quarter of 2019 was the largest Q2 in the company’s history.