[ELECTRONIC MUSIC]
Welcome to this video-lecture of Live Text Access:
Training for real-time intralingual subtitlers.
My name is Julia Borchert.
This is Unit 4 Entrepreneurship and service competence.
Element 1: Management and interpersonal skills.
This lecture is about basics of customer acquisition.
The materials are created by SUBTI-Access and ZDF Digital.
This is the learning outcome:
Identify possible clients and sponsors in his or her country
of real-time intralingual subtitling service.
In this video-lecture I will talk about a few aspects
of customer acquisition management rudimentary at first.
After that more into detail about strategies,
which are speech to text-job-related.
And at the end I will sum everything up shortly.
First of all a few words
about customer acquisition management in general.
Customer acquisition management is a set of techniques
used to manage customer interests and inquiries generated by marketing.
Customer acquisition management can be considered
as the connection between advertising
and customer relationship management to acquire new customers.
The first step of any basic customer acquisition plan
is to identify quality potential customers.
And that's what we are focusing on in this lecture.
But at first a few more points about customer acquisition
and business management in general.
When you want to find clients and get new jobs,
a relationship with the prospects needs to be established.
You need to identify their needs
and check if your product fulfills those needs.
The goal of this process is to create a systematic,
sustainable acquisition strategy,
that can evolve with new trends and changes.
Customer acquisition is therefore about winning new customers
for your company or your services, you are providing.
There are various methods for this,
which are roughly divided into cold and warm canvassing.
In cold calling, there is no contact with the potential customers yet.
It means for example calling or visiting a possible customer
to try to sell them something without being asked by the customer to do so.
In warm acquisition, a relationship already exists,
for example, a prospect receives your newsletter.
What strategies are useful to identify possible clients
as a speech to text interpreter?
At listing different strategies to identify possible clients,
I have to make a distinction between different jobs
of real-time intralingual subtitling services.
I distinguish between client acquisition for TV stations,
speech to text for big events
and speech to text for individual disabled people.
The way to identify and find possible clients
is for every kind of job slightly different.
But what all client acquisition strategies
have in common is following:
It's unavoidable to make a good planning
and a careful market analysis.
So you get an overview of providers,
products, products already offered and what is asked on the market.
Make researches who is offering live speech to text services
or live subtitles.
This way, you can identify possible clients.
Like providers, channels, organizer, promoter, companies and so on.
The government regulations of accessibility
in the respective country must be checked.
This way you can maybe also spot jobs or clients,
who you didn't had in mind.
A good research is necessary and very important.
Check supporter, sponsors, associations, public tenders,
trade fairs, events, current debates, and so on.
And of course get in touch with others in the industry.
Due to direct exchange of information,
it is easy to stay up to date.
It is important to attract attention.
How do you attract attention as a provider?
First of all, it is good to have a meaningful internet presence.
For example with a good structured website, which is easy to find.
Keep in mind that it's very important
to create this website accessible for all.
Because some possible clients maybe depend on this.
For example private disabled people,
who wants to assign you for accessibility services.
This refers especially to speech to text jobs
for individual Deaf or Hard of Hearing people.
What else is important to attract attention?
In these times a lot of exchange
and information retrieval is happening at social media.
You can follow for example associations
and attract attention due to commenting or reposting their posts.
Of course you need an own profile and be active.
Sign up in online business networks like LinkedIn.
Here you also can connect with others and catch attention.
Unavoidable in this industry is to participate at trade fairs,
exhibitions and conferences.
There you can establish contacts, get to know the structures
and of course attract attention.
Like I mentioned before one method of customer acquisition
is cold calling.
When you have identified possible clients or sponsors,
you can get in touch with them even when they don't know you yet.
This can happen for example through Emails.
You can write a direct message or send a form of newsletter.
And of course you can call or pass by personally
and explain what you are offering and how important accessibility is.
Maybe some potential clients are not aware of it.
Another marketing tool is to make sponsoring
at trade fairs and conferences.
That point is interesting for companies above all.
When it's an event with a big reach, a lot of people become aware
of your real-time intralingual subtitling or speech to text service.
When there are public tenders, participate.
Even when you won't win it and get the job,
people get to know you and maybe keep you in mind for other offers.
Public tenders are a very important way in this industry to get a job.
Especially for Live-Subtitling for TV or big events.
How do you find out about tenders?
The easiest way is to make researches on the internet.
There are special platforms where tenders are published.
When you receive newsletters of internals of the industry
read them carefully.
Sometimes also on this way
providers call for tenders and the participation.
And of course on trade fairs and conferences
the chances are good to hear about tenders.
Furthermore public tenders can be found at social media,
the personnel contact to others and networking.
As for events it is very helpful to have a clear picture
of which potential customers are out there and who could use this service.
This could be an organization or an NGO,
that organize events which also include deaf
or Hard of Hearing participants.
Or international events,
where not all participants are fluent in English.
These could be contacted and then you can also explain
why it is important their meetings are accessible for everyone.
Mentioning for example the UNCRPD.
The convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
This is the first comprehensive human rights treaty
of the 21st century.
Another opportunity to get a job is due recommendation.
Of course it is necessary here that you have already done a good job.
When the feedback was positive you can get references.
Besides that, once you start to work as an interpreter,
you will usually create a circle of clients you work for.
And this will grow once you do more and more jobs.
Colleagues among themselves exchange jobs or refer to clients
if they cannot do jobs themselves.
So it is important to have a good relationship with your colleagues.
Another good strategy of getting experience
and getting in contact with other people and organisations,
is to ask fellow interpreters if you can attend a meeting
just for practice purposes.
So sit in the background and also practice during a meeting.
Other helpful points that you need to keep in mind,
which help you to get in touch with potential clients:
Keep your website or your job-profile updated.
When jobs were fulfilled add them to your portfolio.
As a speech to text interpreter you need to check the information
through organizations and agencies regularly.
There you can find Hard of Hearing or Deaf clients
via the user's organizations.
Disabled people ask there for an interpreter.
It's helpful to have the user's point of view in mind.
So let's have a look.
Deaf or Hard of Hearing users can contact speech to text interpreters
for daily support or special events.
The most users are booking people
with whom they already had good experience.
Or from whom they know that they did a good job for another user.
The community is well connected
and they exchange information with each other.
Users can also apply to organisations and ask for interpreters there.
They often offer to check
which registered interpreter is free to work for the time in demand.
On some national interpreters authority websites
you can see how many speech to text companies there are,
their names and also in which area of the country they operate.
Each country has their own system.
In some countries only the way via an organisation is possible.
So that the client or user can't chooses by itself
a speech to text interpreter.
In some countries the deaf and Hard of Hearing people
are granted a certain number of hours of speech to text per year.
[SHE COUGHS]
Sorry. An example of Denmark:
When there disabled people like deaf or Hard of Hearing people
do political work within disability at national and international level,
they can book speech to text interpreters for free.
But unfortunately this is often unrecognized even by the authorities.
So this can often a struggle for the user.
Summary.
Customer acquisition management can be considered
as the connection between advertising and customer relationship management
to acquire new customers.
The first step of any basic customer acquisition plan
is to identify quality potential customers and their needs.
A careful market analysis is unavoidable and very important.
To appear as a provider, you need to attract attention
through various techniques and strategies.
It's necessary to stay up to date and be present at the internet,
at conferences, fair trades and other events.
To have the user's point of view in mind could be helpful.
This other perspective can enable new ways of thinking.
Exercises.
The exercises for this video-lecture
are in the trainer's guide and at the PowerPoint file.
[ELECTRONIC MUSIC]
LTA - LiveTextAccess.
Universitat Aut�noma de Barcelona.
SDI - Internationale Hochschule.
Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici.
ZDF Digital.
The European Federation of Hard of Hearing People - EFHOH.
VELOTYPE. SUB-TI ACCESS.
European Certification and Qualification Association - ECQA.
Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.
Erasmus+ Project: 2018-1-DE01-KA203-004218.
The information and views set on this presentation
are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the official opinion of the European Union.
Neither the European Union institutions and bodies
nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use
which may be made of the information contained here.