Choosing a college is a deeply personal decision. Prospective students want to know about degree programs, tuition, financial aid, and career opportunities, but they also want to understand what it will actually feel like to attend a particular school. That why video should be a part of your college marketing strategy.
Professional video production gives colleges and universities a way to show prospective students their campus, introduce them to faculty and students, highlight academic programs, and communicate the personality of the institution. While written content and photography remain important, video can provide a more immediate and engaging look at the college experience.
For colleges competing for students in an increasingly crowded higher education market, video should be an important part of the marketing strategy.
Video Shows Prospective Students What Your College Is Really Like
A college website can tell prospective students about campus life, but video can show it to them.
A campus tour video can give students a sense of the buildings, facilities, residence halls, and surrounding area. A student testimonial can provide a more personal perspective on the experience. A video featuring faculty members can put a face to an academic program and help prospective students understand what makes it different. These experiences are difficult to communicate through text alone.
Video gives prospective students an opportunity to see the people, places, and experiences that make your institution unique. That can be particularly valuable for students who cannot easily visit campus in person.
Video Can Help Promote Specific Academic Programs
College marketing should not only promote the institution as a whole. Individual academic programs also need to attract prospective students.
A nursing program, business school, engineering department, or graduate program may have completely different audiences and selling points. Program-specific videos can focus on the faculty, facilities, coursework, student experiences, and career opportunities that matter to those audiences.
These videos can then be incorporated into program pages on the college website, recruitment campaigns, email marketing, social media, and digital advertising.
Rather than relying on the same general college marketing message for every prospective student, video allows universities to tell more specific stories to the people they are trying to reach.
Student and Faculty Stories Build Trust
Prospective students naturally want to hear from people who have experienced the college themselves.
Student testimonials can provide an authentic perspective on academics, campus life, extracurricular activities, and the transition to college. Faculty interviews can demonstrate the expertise and accessibility of professors while giving prospective students a better understanding of what they can expect from a program.
Alumni videos can tell another important part of the story by demonstrating how an education from the institution has influenced someone’s career and life.
These stories can make a college feel more accessible and relatable. Instead of simply telling prospective students that your institution provides a great experience, you can let members of your community demonstrate it.
Video Gives Your Marketing Team More Content to Work With
Professional video production can also provide a wide range of marketing assets from a single project.
A longer campus or program video can potentially be repurposed into shorter clips for social media, advertisements, email campaigns, and website content. Interviews can produce multiple pieces of content featuring different topics or members of the college community. This gives marketing teams more opportunities to reach prospective students across the channels they already use.
Video can be especially useful for social media advertising, where short, visually engaging content can capture attention and introduce prospective students to a college or program.
Professional Production Matters
There is a difference between having video content and having video that represents your institution well.
Colleges have invested years in building their reputations. Poor lighting, distracting audio, awkward editing, or inconsistent branding can undermine the professional image an institution wants to present.
Professional video production brings together cinematography, lighting, audio, editing, motion graphics, scripting, and storytelling. More importantly, a professional production team can approach a project with the marketing objective in mind.
The goal isn’t simply to create a nice-looking video. It is to create a piece of content that communicates something meaningful to the right audience and supports a larger recruitment or marketing goal.
Video Can Support More Than Student Recruitment
Although student recruitment is an obvious application, colleges can use professional video across many areas of their marketing and communications.
Video can help universities:
- Promote academic programs
- Highlight faculty expertis
- Showcase campus facilities
- Recruit faculty and staff
- Support fundraising campaigns
- Tell alumni stories
- Promote events
- Introduce new initiatives
- Highlight research
- Share student success stories
- Promote continuing education and workforce programs
This makes video a long-term marketing asset rather than a one-time recruitment tool.
Why Work With a Professional Video Production Team?
Colleges often have talented marketing and communications professionals on staff. However, producing high-quality video requires specialized equipment, technical expertise, production time, and post-production resources that may not be practical to maintain internally.
Working with an outside video production and digital marketing firm gives colleges access to those capabilities when they need them without requiring the institution to maintain a full production operation in-house.
An outside team can also bring a fresh perspective. Because they are not immersed in the institution every day, they may identify stories, people, and experiences that internal teams have become accustomed to overlooking.
How RevenFlo Can Help
RevenFlo provides professional video production as part of a broader college marketing strategy for colleges and universities. We can help institutions develop video content that supports recruitment, program marketing, branding, fundraising, and other communications goals.
Our team can work with your existing marketing department or take responsibility for an entire video project, from developing the concept through production and post-production.
The result is video that does more than showcase your campus. It becomes part of a larger college marketing strategy designed to communicate your institution’s strengths and connect with the audiences that matter most. Contact RevenFlo to get started.