Do you want more of your target audiences to see your video content? There are number of video marketing best practices that you can implement immediately at minimal cost that will help you and your university do just that.
Video marketing is an often overlooked part of the video production process. As a result, the full potential of their video content is never realised. To give this video content the best chance of reaching its target audience, universities must implement video marketing best practice for every single piece of content they produce. These video marketing best practices are as follows:
Website
The Basics
Your university’s website is in all likelihood the primary point of information for your institution. These days, it is probably the hub of all your marketing activity, and in all likelihood attracts thousands of visitors per month. Despite this, not all university videos get uploaded to their institution’s website. Many of these videos (often departmental ones) are only uploaded to YouTube. This will undoubtedly limit their exposure and views.
Suggested action: Make sure all of your video content is on your university’s website.
Location
Let’s say that all of your video content has been uploaded to your university’s website. The next thing to check is video location. Is your video in the place(s) where viewers would expect to find it? For example, is your PG study video on your PG study webpage? If it isn’t, you’re essentially making it harder for visitors to discover it.
Suggested action: Check that video content is in all the right places.
Navigation
If you want your videos to be watched, they must be easy to find. This is why their location must be clearly signposted on your website. Think internal links and enticing thumbnail images. These links and thumbnail images should tie in with the “customer journey” you want visitors to take on your website.
Suggested action: Make sure all of your video content is clearly signposted.
Website Video SEO
A webpage with video content on it is 52 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google than without it. For this statistic to take to be fully felt, all of your university’s video content must be properly optimised for search engine discovery. Amongst other things, this process involves creating a video site-map for your website. With this in place, you are much more likely to achieve high rankings, traffic, and therefore video views.
Suggested action: Implement website video SEO strategies
YouTube
The Basics
There are not one, but two massive reasons to upload your video content to YouTube.
1) YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine after Google. It’s far more popular than sites such as Yahoo, and Bing. It’s videos attract billions of views a day. If you want to benefit from some of this traffic, your content needs to be uploaded to it.
2) 80% of the videos that appear in the Google search engine results comes from YouTube. If you want to improve your search engine ranking, get your videos viewed, and drive traffic to your website, uploading your video content to YouTube is a great way to do this.
To benefit in both cases, you must ensure your video content has been optimised for search engine discovery i.e. both by YouTube and Google. This is no easy feat. but the basics involve tagging your video content with the right metadata.
Suggested action: Make sure all of your videos have been uploaded to YouTube & optimised.
Location & Navigation
Before you upload all of your video content to YouTube channel(s), it important to work out how you are going to structure all of your videos so that viewers can understand how to find and navigate their way through them. With the development of .edu YouTube Channels for Higher Ed institutions, you’d think this decision were easy. Unfortunately it’s not. The blur between marketing content and educational content seems to be causing a lot of confusion and debate i.e. should they both be on the same channel.
Whatever YouTube channel set up you decide on, it is critical that the user journey of your YouTube channel has been mapped out. Where possible videos should be linked other relevant ones using “YouTube annotations”. This can encourage further video views on your Channel(s).
Suggested action: Think carefully about YouTube channel purpose and content architecture
Other Publishing Platforms
Social Media
Whilst your university’s website and YouTube are undoubtedly the primary locations for your video content, there are also numerous other social media publishing platforms you should be distributing your content through.
Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and PinInterest, all have their role. A well thought out social media campaign which considers the intended audience and purpose of the video content is an integral part to any video marketing campaign.
Suggested action: Develop a social media strategy for your video content.
Third Party Websites
In addition to social media platforms, universities should also be trying to publish their content on sites where their target audiences are hanging out, and where these audiences expect to see their presence. Websites such as UCAS, Yougo, Prospects, Findamasters, and iTunesU are obvious examples of these. Forgetting about these websites is a silly mistake, made in my opinion far too often.
Suggested action: Brainstorm which third party websites would be good for your video content, and work out ways to get it on them.
Physical Forms of Marketing
Paper Based Materials
Paper based materials are still a major part of a university’s marketing & communications strategy. This paper based material can also help you “promote” your video content. Items such as your prospectus for example should contain links to important and relevant pieces of video content e.g. students testimonials. Where possible these links should be a URL on your university’s website rather than the university’s YouTube channel. There are a lot of “distractions” on YouTube.
Suggested action: Whenever you are producing a piece of paper based marketing, consider what kind of video content it should be linking to.
Presentations
Internet video content can be shown in the “real world” too. For example, it can be a really effective way to complement or begin a presentation. This is particularly true at events such as International admissions presentations which benefit from the use of video e.g. video testimonials and tours of campuses.
Suggested action: Have a look through your video assets. Would any of these videos enhance your presentations?
Exhibitions
Exhibitions are competitive events. There are always plenty of people trying to attract the attention of attendees. Video content can be used to grab the attention of passers by. In my experience, it draws people in.
Suggested action: Consider whether your video content or (a re-edit of it) could be used at your exhibitions.
DVD & USB sticks
Video content can be uploaded to DVD & USB sticks, and handed out to people at events. DVDs & USB sticks are “take home” items. Distributing video content in this way encourages people to watch this media in their own time. They are perceived as a valuable item.
Suggested action: Have a think which events your video could be “handed” out at.