Video Marketing for Schools and Universities: Top 5 Strategies (With Simple Examples)

Title

Video Marketing for Schools and Universities: Top 5 Strategies (With Simple Examples)

Date

Aug 11, 2023

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In this guide, we’re sharing how to go about video marketing for schools and universities along with 3 stellar examples to get you started.

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Current Column

Sanketee

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Sanketee

Video Marketing for Schools and Universities: Top 5 Strategies (With Simple Examples)

Educational institutions run on reputation. To get new students and establish credibility, you must get your school's name out there and build positive recognition.

Video marketing is one of the best ways to do that. It builds trust, encourages social shares, and effectively communicates your institute's story.

Reports state that 93% of consumers find videos helpful for purchasing decisions. By integrating videos into your school's marketing strategy, you can:

Provide a quick overview of your institution's culture, programs, and offerings

Engage prospective parents

Enable informed decision making

In today's article, we share the benefits of video marketing for schools/ universities and how you can implement it for better visibility and higher ROI.

What is video marketing for schools?

Video marketing for schools is a content outreach program to inform parents and students about an institution's educational offerings and persuade them to enroll there. Many schools use video marketing for teacher acquisitions, alumni engagement, donations, and event updates.

Benefits of video marketing for schools

Here's why schools should prioritize video marketing in their promotional efforts:

Boosts engagement

Video content is easy to consume. Moreover, the combination of audio and visuals create an emotional and memorable experience for the viewer. They grab the audience’s attention quickly and get them invested.

It amplifies engagement and lets you reach a broader range of prospects.

Generates high-quality prospective parents

A well-produced video conveys information clearly. You can give a glimpse of a typical day at your school, introduce them to your extra-curricular activities, and showcase educational methods.

Virtual campus tours let people experience your school’s environment. This provides prospective parents with accurate insights into your school and make an informed decision.

Improves authenticity

Professionally curated ads aren’t sufficient to convince present-day audiences. Your endorsements should come from real people.

Through school/university video marketing, you can showcase testimonials with happy parents and students describing their experience with your institution. It enhances marketing authenticity, convinces prospects of your school's reputation, and makes them more likely to enroll their children.

Improves SEO ranking

As videos are more engaging than text-based content, they can reduce bounce rate and improve time-on-page. It indicates to the search engines your website offers valuable information and improves overall ranking.

Moreover, videos are shareable across channels, which drives further traffic to your content and enhances your content’s SEO.

How to create a video marketing strategy for schools

Now that we know the perks of higher education video marketing, let’s dive into the strategies:

Define your goals and objectives

Before anything else, identify your school’s goals and objectives for video marketing. It keeps your efforts targeted and measurable.

Start by laying down your overarching goals and broad outcomes you aim for through video marketing. Common goals for school video marketing include:

Increasing enrollment

Better communication

Improving engagement

Get more donations

Leverage the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) framework for your higher education video marketing. This approach will create strategic aspirations instead of vague goals.

For example, if your goal is to increase engagement, make it more time-bound and measurable, like: “We need to increase views on our university marketing campaigns by 35% among parents and students within the next 6 months.”

Understand your audience

The next step is to understand your audience and identify what drives their decision while choosing a school. Collect first-party and third-party data and analyze them to categorize your target market. Proper segmentation makes your university marketing campaigns more targeted, value-driven, and impactful.

The audience for higher education generally includes students, parents, teachers, beneficiaries, and alums. Each has different priorities, and your video marketing must accommodate them.

Focus on these to define your audience:

Demographics: Age, location, religion, ethnicity, language, income level.

Psychographics: Aspirations, lifestyle, values, interests, hobbies, quality of living, safety, affordability, and prospects for their children.

Pain points: Social roadblocks and biases, financial problems, difficulty in choosing courses, etc.

Nail down the logistics

Once you clearly understand your higher education video marketing goals and target audience, sort out the logistics for each project. It includes:

Budget

To ensure a good ROI, you must remain within your budget. Audit your finances and see how much funds you can allocate for marketing video production, including scripts, filming, and editing. Examine what range of operation that bracket allows and plan accordingly.

Timeline

For each project, detail the required time for your higher education video marketing. Set an estimated end date for each production and account for unexpected delays.

Resources

See if you have the necessary tools and resources for producing and promoting your school marketing videos. Get a content calendar to streamline distribution. Keep your creative assets like photos, interviews, and infographics for seamless production.

Choose the relevant channels

To reach your target market effectively, your hosting channel choices should be segment specific. Here’s what you need to do:

Focus on platforms your key audiences are the most active on.

Ensure alignment of customer preferences, video marketing goals, and your chosen channels.

Create a dedicated YouTube channel for your institution to showcase campus life, testimonials from students and teachers, virtual tours, seminars, etc.

Use Instagram to post vibrant campus pictures, behind-the-scenes, event updates, etc.

Choose TikTok to drive engagement from prospective students.

You can use LinkedIn to appeal to working professionals seeking further education.

Run paid advertising through Google Ads, Facebook, and YouTube for targeting specific demographics.

Looking to host your videos on a single Wall of Love? Testimonial’s features make it a child’s play.

Plan your content

Next step is to detail your content plan according to customer segments, your marketing goals, and your chosen hosting platforms.

Start by making a list of potential topics to cover. Brainstorm new ideas with your marketing team. Competitor analysis insights may inspire content ideas like educational marketing videos or a university promotional video.

Choose what type of videos you want to market. Some formats include:

Welcome video: Introduce the school's campus, facilities, and staff and offer a view of the institution’s environment.

Educational video: Highlight the quality of education through special lectures, innovative teaching methods, and the curriculum.

Student life: Feature extracurricular activities, sports, and events. Talk about the institution’s various clubs and societies. It highlights personal growth and skill development opportunities outside academia.

Virtual campus tour: Offer virtual tours of the classroom, labs, hostels, and the campus in an immersive way. These are especially important to engage prospects who can’t visit the campus in person.

Event videos: Cover key events like graduation ceremonies, competitions, performances, prom, etc.

Video testimonials: Record testimonials from students and parents sharing their positive experiences with the institution. Collect online course testimonials to promote your virtual programs.

Expert interviews: Invite educators and industry experts to discuss relevant educational topics.

FAQs: Answer common questions and grievances from parents and students in your university videos.

Instead of choosing one or two video formats, diversify your content from time to time. It keeps the audience interested for longer and amplifies engagement. While producing the videos, remember to:

Use quality recording and editing equipment for professional-looking videos.

Prioritize lighting, audio quality, camera stability, etc.

Keep the videos brief and engaging.

Strike e a balance between informative and visually appealing content.

Use storytelling techniques to make the videos more memorable.

Social media is your best shot at reaching your target audience. You can intrigue students and parents and get them to explore your campus and programs by posting informative, relatable, and engaging videos.

Make sure your videos are shareable. Create campaign-specific hashtags to encourage more online conversations around your institutions. Hashtags also make it easier to collect UGC and use them as social proof.

You can post short clips as reels or YouTube shorts and add the full video link in the description. Repost on Facebook and Instagram stories for constant engagement.

👉🏽

Testimonial’s integrations support platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Post some behind-the-scenes events and casual chats with teachers, professors, and other staff. Record video testimonials from students, alums, and parents. It makes your marketing more authentic and gains your prospect’s trust.

Reply to comments and messages to engage with your audience. It lets you build meaningful bonds with the audience and gather high-quality leads to follow up on later. You can also collaborate with relevant influencers to promote your events and programs.

Use email marketing

Thanks to its robust use, email remains one of the most reliable marketing channels. So, if your institution already has an email list, use it for your school's video marketing.

According to reports, adding a video to emails makes campaigns more impactful, boosting clickthrough rates by 65% and open rates by 19%. So, to get more mileage from your video marketing campaigns, share them with your email list.

Add vibrant thumbnails to your videos. Add attention-grabbing subject lines. That way, you will heighten the chances of your recipient opening the email, engaging with the video, and taking the desired action.

Include relevant and impactful CTAs that direct to your ongoing campaign page, program information, prospectus, or channel subscription. Add social media widgets and ask the recipient to share the video.

Focus on SEO

Video marketing for schools has to be SEO optimized for better organic visibility. Here are some measures you can take:

Identify relevant keywords your prospects may use to search for educational content. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to detect high-traffic and low-competition keywords related to your programs and offerings.

Curate brief, keyword-rich, and compelling video titles. Try to add your primary keyword at the beginning of the title.

Add keywords in the video descriptions too.

Use relevant tags for your videos. It lets the platform’s algorithm understand your content and enhances its discoverability.

Create eye-catching thumbnails that represent your video’s content accurately.

Consider using location-specific keywords if your school is active only in a specific location.

Create a video sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. This way, search engines will understand your content and index it correctly.

Maintain consistency

For sustaining your university videos’ engagement and visibility, your video marketing effort should be consistent. That entails sharing content when your audience is the most active and following a posting schedule.

Run competitor analysis to determine the best time to post your content. You can also use marketing automation tools and a content calendar to streamline posting.

If you use different formats for your school video marketing, ensure your style remains on-brand and cohesive across all pieces. It builds brand recognition and conveys your messaging more effectively.

Track relevant KPIs

You must measure your marketing success regularly to align your efforts with long-term goals. Accurate metric assessments also let you make strategic improvements and enhance the relevancy of your campaigns.

According to reports, 63% of video marketers consider the number of views on their videos as one of the primary metrics to measure the ROI on their video content. Apart from that, other important school video marketing metrics include:

Open rates

Social media shares

View-through rates

Cost-per lead

Impressions

Compare the generated numbers with historical data to measure growth. Benchmark the results against the conversion rate for a more conclusive insight.

Conclusion

Video marketing can drive better exposure and increased ROI for your institution. It shows prospective parents and students what your school can offer and gives them a tangible view of your campus culture.

Here are some key takeaways for video marketing for schools:

Conduct audience research and audit your resources

Build a thriving digital presence with engaging videos

Diversify your marketing with different video formats

Leverage email marketing

Be consistent

Measure relevant KPIs and strive for constant strategic improvement

Finally, embed testimonials on your website to establish your school’s credibility.

Sounds tricky? With Testimonial, you can easily import video endorsements to your website directly without hiring expensive developers.

Want to bring more students to your school and boost ROI? Sign up for our free trial today!

Video Marketing for Schools and Universities: Top 5 Strategies (With Simple Examples)