How Is Video Marketing Changing the Landscape of Indian Higher Education?

Due to growing effectiveness, videos have become an integral part of education marketing. It is the best tool of engagement to target marketing campaigns around your target audience.

Content consumption on YouTube and other online video platforms are increasing day by day. Youth or the student community is the biggest consumer of such content. They are fast-moving to the internet media for watching videos. Hence, as an educational institute catering to a large population of students, you cannot ignore this popular medium of promotion. Depending on your advertising choice, you can decide to reach out to your target audience through videos.

Video marketing can be a cost-effective supplementing to your traditional advertising activities such as print or outdoor advertising. Without any extra spending, you can capture the entire spectrum of the target market and more.

Social Platforms for Video Marketing

YouTube in India has spurred a thriving content economy cutting across demographics. It is fast becoming the most-watched platform for millions of internet users in India.

YouTube has already crossed 240 million monthly active users in India, and it reaches 80-85 percent of the country’s internet population. This makes India one of its top global markets. The company says more than 60 percent of its watch-time in India comes from outside the six metros.

The wide range of success of YouTube means that it should be one of the key platforms for your college or university to run video marketing campaigns. Moreover, YouTube allows its publishers a broad range of advertising options to increase engagement.

Besides YouTube, Facebook video traffic is also bolstering as more and more people are increasingly using its service to catch up on their interests.

Including Facebook in your college’s video marketing strategy can push your promotional efforts forward. Facebook still dominates consumer targeting business due to its mass popularity. Over the years it has enhanced its offerings so that users can upload videos or generate live video feeds.

Engagement through videos is better due to its organic reach.  It is more effective than text-based content marketing strategies. Millennials prefer to see videos than reading text-based content.

Video Formats and Available Choices

Now that we are aware of prominent platforms to disseminate our video content, let’s explore the formats and choices it provides to publishers. As a college or university, you have abundant ways to use video for your admissions campaign.

Video Bytes

Starting with the most fundamental format of video creation is a video byte.  This format can be used to highlight students’ experience at campus, teaching and learning process or any other USP of your college. Video bytes are usually of shorter duration and therefore more effective in terms of driving engagement.

Video bytes help you to present key elements of your institute in a very crisp, precise and direct manner. You can use video bytes to convey the testimonials of students and parents.

On non-YouTube media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, the publisher has less time to attract the attention of its viewers. Therefore one has to ensure that the videos do not cross the desirable threshold length of the video format.

Webinars or Live Sessions

Webinars or Facebook Live sessions are conducted in real time. It can be useful where your college intends to engage a mass audiences at one go on a topic of common interest. This format also enables academic institutions to address students’ queries instantly. A powerful medium for conducting doubt clearing or Q&A sessions, webinars help to create better connections with your target audience. Sessions on the admission process, course offerings, etc. are considered to generate a lot of engagement during the admission season.

Webinars can also be viewed later as they get recorded as well. As you conduct more webinars on popular topics, your video content will grow and have variety.

Campus Tours

Giving a live tour of your school campus might be another great way to gather some traction and build a following.

Promoting Techniques for Your College Videos to get Best Results

Your video marketing campaigns will only be successful if it is backed by a proper promotion strategy. You can promote your college videos through a number of properties – admission brochure, television commercial, application forms, and newspaper, etc. The only thing you have to do is provide a link to your online video resources.

You can even use QR code for people to scan it using their smartphones. It’ll take them directly to the college’s video page.

While creating videos one should focus on keeping the video cantered around the story, and not the final sale. Avoid sale clutter in your video pitch.

Make the most of the emotive power of video by appealing to the needs and interests of your target group. Add relevant calls to action at a strategic place in the video. Track the performance of your video campaign using UTM codes.

Usually, the users are hooked on to your videos if the initial ten seconds are catchy, interesting and short to the point. That is why social platforms recommend videos of the shorter length to drive maximum engagement.

You may generate your audience’s curiosity by starting the video by asking a pertinent question so that they are glued till the end or at least for major portion of the video to find the answer.

Use the element of emotion to create connect. Optimize your video using SEO for users to find it on search engines. Use proper tagging to increase its outreach. Ensure that video description includes all relevant keywords that will help in generating the desired traction for your video content.

Common Challenges in Video Marketing to Overcome

Video marketing is one of the best known effective components of education marketing. Many academic brands are looking for strategies to enhance their audience’s experience using video engagement.

The idea of video marketing has changed the way educational institutes in higher education use content. The challenge while pushing video creation comes in terms of an effective strategy, budget, lack of adequate resources and expertise, etc. However, these challenges can be overcome by smart interventions.

To do things right, only opt for ideas and proposals that are most suitable for your institute’s overall brand impact. Rest other things will fall in place. Just like any other activity you do, you need to have a well thought of strategy regarding video marketing. Lack of proper planning of resources and expertise could lead to unforeseen failures.

Lack of high-quality content is another issue that is holding most academic marketers back. One great way to overcome this could be by leveraging the talent of your students for producing high-quality content for your video.

Above all, the most important aspect of video marketing to look into is metrics. When it comes to defining the metrics to measure the performance of your video campaigns, you need to be careful since this is what will give you the indication to know whether your ideas are working or not.

With the right strategy, resource and measurement metrics, it is possible to come up with a video campaign that will help your institute position itself effectively among its target audience. If you be careful on the above challenges, your video marketing campaigns can engage and educate your prospective stakeholders more than any other way.

Conclusion

As per clickz.com, “By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic which is 15 times higher than 2017”. According to Statista, in 2018, 25-34 years watched the most video content.

So, it is evident from the above stats that video can provide social proof for your college branding more effectively than any other digital tool. Including videos in your college’s marketing efforts may not be as difficult as you think. And as you move on you will encounter more sophisticated techniques to tackle.

Video is a necessary component in most content marketing strategies. But the important thing is to begin first.