3 Unique Ways to Attract Dream Families with Content

Virtual Tours

Getting the feel for campus is an important part of selecting a school, and technology makes it possible to feel like you’re there, even when you’re not. A virtual tour can be as simple as a video highlighting significant spots on campus, or as fancy as a virtual reality-style experience.

You can allow visitors to explore a 3D environment on their own, like Sierra Canyon School; host a 3D tour like Colorado State; provide multiple options, like King School; or, if budget is your concern, use video clips to create a virtual tour experience like The Prairie School.

Regardless of the style and your budget, creating an on-demand virtual tour experience gives families a feel for your school, right from their computer. And it just might be that impressive virtual tour that makes them want to make the time to set foot on your campus in real life.

Webinars

The magic of webinars is that much less coordination is involved than an in-person event. Your guest speaker can be anywhere in the world, and so can your audience. Your webinar can be live or pre-recorded, and once it’s over, you can turn it into a piece of on-demand content on your school website.

You want a catchy webinar topic that your audience will clamor to watch, so use these tips to start brainstorming.

Workshop/Speaker Series

Hosting workshops or a speaker series can be a great way to connect with current students and families and make for an engaging and active school community. Usually, these are one-time events, often with limited seating and no time flexibility. Record these events, however, and you have a long-lasting, flexible, on-demand piece of content that allows you to reach more of your current families but also to demonstrate your commitment to your school community to prospective families as well.

Should you gate your content?

With all on-demand content, you’ll need to consider whether to gate your content or not, or in other words: will you require visitors to enter their information in order to receive the content, or leave it open to all?

When you gate content, you get the benefit of collecting information from your audience and adding them to your email list—this can be a great benefit to your enrollment marketing efforts! The downside is, gates can deter some people, and make it more cumbersome to view the outstanding content you’ve just created, so you need to consider each piece of content when deciding to gate.

Let’s explore a scenario in which you decide to create an on-demand virtual campus tour as well as an on-demand workshop video. You might decide to leave your virtual tour ungated, so there are no barriers to exploring your campus, but you might choose to gate the workshop video. (If you want to understand more about gated content, read this.)

As you consider on-demand content, think about what other types of school marketing content you currently create, and how you can reuse it in an on-demand format. The list above provides a helpful place to start, but explore your upcoming content and your archives to see what you can create.

Want to learn exactly how to win over dream families with breakthrough school storytelling? Check out our Audience-First School Storytelling Kit.