Video is a trend that shows no sign of slowing down, and in 2020, it’s a no-brainer that video content should play a crucial part in your education marketing strategy.

If utilised correctly, video can be a powerful asset to form a robust marketing mix, and works exceptionally well to educate and inform students and student prospects, as well as facilitating the decision-making journey.

According to HubSpot:

Read on to find out how you can incorporate video content into your content marketing strategy.

For education providers and the like, Video Marketing is the means of using video to promote and market your service, encourage engagement and conversions on your digital and social channels, and help to educate both existing students and student prospects.

At Candlefox, we love rich content. That’s why we’ve built our whole content strategy around it.

By creating premium content for people – not solely for Google’s bots – we attract the right target audience through meaningful and valuable content that people connect with.

This notion also ties into the concept of ‘Research Rethink Remix’ – the mantra of digital marketing strategist and content genius, Ross Simmonds.

This idea is centred around taking your top-performing assets and moulding them into different formats.

For our site Training.com.au, we have an epic resource around ‘Mature Age Apprenticeships’.

To give it that extra boost and employ the concept of ‘Remixing’ our existing content, we collaborated with TAFE provider, The Gordon, to interview some mature age apprentices and create a video resource that supplements our existing content.

The purpose of this video interview was to provide our audience with an easy-to-digest content format that delves into the experiences of real-life mature age apprentices, and why they should consider giving it a go.

The video went live on the article at the end of October 2019. Comparing January 2020 to October 2019, we saw our:

Native video content has also grown to become a crucial player in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

By incorporating rich, relevant video content on your website, this can help to boost SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings on Google.

The key phrase here is ‘rich, relevant video content’. Simply slotting a random video on an unrelated webpage won’t see your rankings skyrocket. Your video should offer relevance and value.

This could be by:

As mentioned earlier, the impact of video content on SEO ranking factors is little more complex than simply adding a video to your website.

When Google crawls your site, they are searching for a wide variety of signals such as the relevance and quality of the page, along with related keywords. When you include a multimedia object, you are hitting all three of these points.

By creating useful video content, this is how you can improve your search rankings:

If you have a basic understanding of Google Analytics, you will know that metrics such as ‘Average Time on Page’ and ‘Bounce Rate’ play an important part in helping to gauge your website’s performance and user experience.

As defined by Google:

‘Average Time on Page’ – The average amount of time users spent viewing a specified page or screen, or set of pages or screens.

‘Bounce Rate’ – The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds.

When a new prospective student lands on your website, there is limited time to really engage and convince them to stick around. This is where a quality video comes into play.

As video content is proven to have much higher engagement when compared to images and text – this means that students are more likely to take the time to really take in what you are trying to convey to them.

When it comes to the impact of ‘Average Time on Page’ and ‘Bounce Rate’ on SEO, if the user ‘dwells’ on your webpage for a substantial amount of time (for example, if they were watching a video), it’s more likely that Google will see your page as one of value and trust.

This will give your page a higher ranking in the SERPs, as ‘Average Time on Page’ will go up, and ‘Bounce Rate’ will go down.

If you choose to take this approach, make sure that your video is ‘above the fold’ (positioned in the upper half of the webpage) so that students have the chance to see it as soon as they load the webpage.

Google is known to update the SERPs to include video content that offers searchers more information about websites and the content they provide.

This is in the form of a ‘Rich Snippet’:

Rich Snippets act as a short cut for users – they can see what they are getting before they even land on a website.

When you give your audience a convenient format to consume your content, you encourage more clicks in the SERPs, which ultimately lead to more traffic.

Along with an engaging title, make sure your video is fully optimised with a click-worthy thumbnail to encourage users to make an action.

In this digital landscape, content sharing makes the world go ‘round.

And if shared across platforms, video can contribute to brand awareness and authority in your space.

An awesome video, if it resonates with the right person, can also prompt someone to link out to where it is being hosted. This is called a ‘Backlink’ and holds massive weight (in the right circumstance) as a vital ranking factor in SEO.

According to Moz, backlinks are the “currency of the internet, as they act a lot like real-life reputation.”

Don’t know what a backlink is? We’ve got your back – check out our ‘3 Tried and Tested Ways of Improving Your Website’s Backlink Portfolio’ article here.

If the above was enough to convince you to bring on video content in 2020, here are some more helpful resources to help you get started:

Video is a content weapon and should not be disregarded.

With these tailored insights, we hope to equip our providers with the knowledge they need to help students and become more sophisticated in their digital marketing strategies.