There has never been a more opportune time to connect with your target audience through a solid video marketing strategy, but I often hear that schools do not fully understand why or how videos will affect their enrollment. You may have been told by a consultant, your peers, or another professional that implementing a video marketing strategy will boost enrollment, but how?
The effect depends on the type of content you create, how you distribute that content, and if the videos give clear instructions on what to do next. These are all areas into which you can invest time and effort to leverage the power of video. Doing so, you’ll be able to humanize your school, share case studies of current or previous students, and even utilize these videos in a way you’ve never considered for fundraising.
In this blog, let’s focus on how building a solid video marketing strategy will boost enrollment.
Plan Your Strategy Before Your Begin
The key to every marketing effort becoming successful is to ensure it fits into a well-planned strategy. You shouldn’t begin producing videos without know exactly why you’re producing it, what your goals are, and where it will fit into your overall campaign. Every video needs to have a goal, and each goal should be slightly different so that when they’re combined, they create a compelling pathway towards conversion..
When the entire campaign comes together, it will help drive not only an increase in enrollment but also an improvement in the quality of your enrollees. How? At the end of your campaign, effective videos will have educated potential enrollees who may have applied for your school without fully understanding your schools mission, values, and goals. Now, they can make a more informed decision.
Humanize Your School
We’re no longer in an era where kids just come to school to learn academic subjects. Modern students get a much wider range of education including being advocates for themselves, playing sports, running clubs, collaborating with other students, and more. This is the time to humanize beyond just the classroom with the ultimate school marketing campaign.
For example, videos that focus on the different offerings of your school, such as testimonials from students in specific extracurricular programs, will help students and families get excited about getting involved in organizations and clubs that spark their interest. Including interviews with teachers and staff will help families get to know and connect with the adults that they will be interacting with every day if they choose to enroll. Putting real faces, personalities, and passion in front of families through your videos will help humanize your school.
Analytics Help You Understand Your Audience
When done right, your videos should be able to be tracked through analytics to understand how people engage with your brand. If you have a two-minute video on your website and you see that only 10% of people make it past the first three to five seconds, it means you should stop to assess what’s wrong and do something different with the beginning of the video.
Once you pinpoint where engagement drops, you should consider making edits and finding any errors that might be causing lost viewership, such as poor audio. Maybe your audience needs a faster-paced video, or maybe they’d rather jump right into the content than start with a logo screen. There are a lot of reasons why someone might choose to stop watching, but the analytics will allow you to pinpoint where things are going wrong so you can course-correct.
Seeing where engagement drops is key to refining your video strategy so that more families make it through your entire video marketing campaign and reach the point of enrollment. The flip side of this process is that you can also see where the audience is most engaged. Having data that tells you which videos and strategies get the most engaged response from viewers will help you implement more of those things so that your strategy only improves over time.
Prove Your School’s Value
Ultimately, videos help increase understanding of the brand and the perceived value of your school. Across your campaign, you should ensure that your brand identity is consistent and that your goals for the audience are clear. Over time, the audience should feel like they understand your brand fully and have enough information to decide to choose your school or move on.
They should also be able to build up the justification in their mind for the price that you’ve set on enrollment. Private school enrollment is an investment, and stopping at only listing the price without giving justification for that number can cause you to lose potential enrollees. Your videos should be providing evidence for why that investment is worth it. Intentionally highlight everything that enhances your brand, while still staying consistent with your identify, to prove the value that backs up the investment.
If you have any questions about how your video strategy can improve enrollment, contact Monzo Media Productions.
