What is the Best Way to Use Video in Your School’s Content Marketing?

Today’s post is guest written by Brad Entwistle. Brad is founder and Managing Director of imageseven. For more than 25 years he has led the Australian imageseven team on a crusade to lift schools’ brands and reveal the true value they deliver to students and their families. When he is not working with schools on their marketing strategy, Brad sits on the boards of two national Australian not-for-profits and enjoys looking at antique maps.

Video is mobile and dynamic, highly shareable and can often be far more engaging than traditional outbound marketing – YouTube alone receives more than three billion views on a daily basis. YouTube is also the leading social network among teens.

Quickly becoming a popular go-to for content marketing, video does work and there are niches where it can work really well for your school. Here are our top ten:

1. Rather than thinking “I need a video” try to think “I need a video to do [fill in the blank]”. It could be a brand storytelling video, which often does well across all channels. They do a really good job of sharing your brand values, origin and mission.
2. Explainer videos. This type of video can be used to give a brief and engaging overview of your proposition no matter how complex it is.
3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Using videos to highlight some key points of a whitepaper you have developed can produce some great SEO rankings.
4. Putting it out free to the public on YouTube. It will gain maximum reach and some really good views, and because Google owns YouTube it will move up in the search ranking. Use a call-to-action to direct traffic back to a whitepaper or downloadable material on your website.
5. Hosting. You can host the video on your website, not on YouTube, known as self-hosting, or work with one of the third party sites such as Wistia or Vimeo.
6. Surrounding material. The text you put around the video will help to improve your SEO on page rankings, meaning the traffic earned by the video is highly likely to stay on your website, very important for SEO.
7. Educational content. It can be thought leadership or a practical guide. Educational content is where online video really started. It allows the viewer to soak it in.
8. Email. Putting video links in an email is proven to increase open rates by 20 percent, according to Brain Shark. If open rates are important to you, it’s a really good tool to have at your disposal.
9. Public relations and external communications. Video works really well in rapid response to a hot topic or issue. Video allows you to take the issue and not only put words around it, but also tone, pace, visible surroundings … everything that adds to the communication.
10. Updates. Particularly financial updates, i.e. your annual report. If you have points in the annual report that are important, video is a great way to take that message, slow it down (a little) and highlight those key points.

How are you using video in your content marketing? Answer in the comments below.

Featured image by Free-Photos via Pixabay