Video Messages for Engagement with Gen Z Students & Families

The secret to successful marketing often comes down to how personalized you can make each marketing message to your audience. Video messaging can make that possible at an extremely individual level.

I have been a customer of BombBomb for several years.

It all started when someone sent me a video in my email inbox.

It was just a little animated thumbnail of them holding a notepad with my name written on it encouraging me to watch the video.

Honestly, it blew me away that somebody took the time to record a personal video for me.

So I looked it up immediately and realized that BombBomb was the tool they used, and that it was very easy and affordable.

I signed up for it that very day.

Now, I’m coming up on having produced and sent over 1,000 videos with the service, and I’ll be the first to confess that I have probably become a fanboy.

However, this post isn’t about BombBomb as a service! (*although I think everyone should consider using it*)

What truly is important is discovering how we as marketers can leverage tools like BombBomb to humanize our marketing and communications with prospective students.

In my experience, a video message just does that so much better than any other medium.

My co-host, Troy Singer, and I had the pleasure to speak with Ethan Beute, the Chief Evangelist for BombBomb, about how to use video messaging to increase engagement with Generation Z and their families.

The Hierarchy of Communication

The first idea Ethan spoke of in our conversation was what he called the “hierarchy” of communication.

Not all mediums of communication are the same.

They each have their own rules, range of impact, and personality.

For Ethan, the most powerful medium of communication is when you “sit across the table from someone.”

Humans have been doing that for millennia. We’re optimized for [one-on-one communication]. There is so much expression, meaning, intent, motivation, and sincerity expressed through our faces naturally. We don’t even have to try to do it! 

[And even more incredibly] other people naturally read that from us automatically, without even trying to do it! The human facial expression of emotion is both universal and innate. It’s universal in that we all do it the same way. There’s a lot of research on how across societies, cultures and time, we all express our emotions the same way through our faces.

Now, imagine losing all of the nuanced emotional communication coming from your facial expressions when you’re trying to motivate, inspire, or simply engage with someone.

You’re now missing a big part of your communication arsenal.

No matter what you’re trying to communicate – whether it’s excitement, joy, concern, or you’re trying to get someone moving on something – there’s so much subtlety and nuance that’s lost [when we do not use a medium where our face can help communicate the message]. 

Unfortunately, when we restrict ourselves only to written medium, we are limited to “substandard, emotionally impoverished communication channels.”

Personally, I love how I can communicate with you, my readers, through my blog.

But I enjoy the fact that I have video messaging as a part of how I communicate. I am not limited to just one medium of communication.

I truly believe enrollment marketers can see the same benefits by adopting video messaging as well in their communication channels.

How much does quality matter?

So let’s say you want to boost your engagement with Gen Z and their families through video messaging, do you need to invest a quarter of your yearly budget in a recording studio?

Ethan answers that head-on.

We’re not talking about lights, scripts, editing, drones, green screens, and production. We’re not talking about videos for your homepage or videos to load up to your Instagram feed or your YouTube channel. Those kinds of videos are appropriate to add to this channel of email. 

But what we’re primarily talking about is casual, conversational webcam or smartphone videos. 

Don’t restrict your mindset about video to simply a produced video that requires a lot of time and a lot of budget. Simple videos are obviously standard now on all the social networks, especially with live videos.

If you are serving somebody, if you’re answering their question, if you’re meeting their needs, if you’re expressing your gratitude, if you’re getting ahead of a problem, if you’re doing any of these things in the spirit of service, production values don’t matter. 

The key thing is that they can hear and see you. If they can hear you clearly and your microphones are not cutting out. And if they can see you because you’re basically well lit, then it’s good enough. 

It’s all about that human-to-human connection when we’re talking about this style of video.

Discover more when you listen to the podcast!

Like all of our blog post reviews of The Higher Ed Marketer podcasts, there’s so much more to learn in the podcasts themselves.

Listen to our interview with Ethan Beute to get even more insights into:

• The philosophy behind why video communication strengthens human connection
• Creating personalized videos and evergreen videos for broader audiences
• Opportunities in higher ed to incorporate video messages
• How video messages can bring tears to people’s eyes

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Featured image by nadia_snopek via Adobe Stock