Category: Tips & Techniques

The decision to go to university does not happen at a single point in time.

It develops gradually, often over several months or even years. Students move through different stages of awareness, consideration, and decision-making, and the type of content that influences them changes as they progress.

In the early stages, awareness is often broad.

Students are beginning to explore options without a fixed view of where they want to go. At this point, content that introduces the institution and communicates a clear sense of identity is important. This is where brand-level storytelling has value. It provides an initial impression and begins to position the university in the student’s mind. read more

Most university and college marketing teams are already operating at capacity.

There is no shortage of ideas, requests, or expectations. Recruitment campaigns need to be delivered. Internal stakeholders require support. New priorities continue to emerge, often without anything being removed. The pressure is not just to produce content, but to produce more of it, across more channels, for more audiences.

In this context, the idea of scaling content can feel unrealistic.

It is often interpreted as doing more work, more often, with the same resources. That is not sustainable, and most teams recognise that quickly. As a result, scaling is either avoided or approached in short bursts that are difficult to maintain. read more

Most university marketing teams are highly effective at delivering campaigns.

They plan them well. They align stakeholders. They produce strong creative. At key moments in the year, the output is clear, visible, and purposeful.

Then the campaign ends.

What follows is often less visible, but more important. The work that came before it does not carry forward in a meaningful way. Messaging shifts. Priorities change. New briefs are written. The next campaign begins as if it exists in isolation.

Over time, this creates a pattern where effort is repeated, but momentum is not built. read more

Most universities and colleges are not short on content.

They are short on structure.

Across almost every team, there is activity. Campaigns are planned. Films are produced. Social channels are active. There are moments in the year where everything comes together and the work is strong.

Then it resets.

A new term begins, priorities shift, and the next piece of content is commissioned without a clear connection to what came before it. The output is consistent in effort, but inconsistent in direction. Over time, this creates a pattern that feels familiar to most marketing teams. Good work, but limited accumulation. read more

Higher Education Marketing: How to Create Emotional Connections with Student Marketing Videos

In today’s competitive higher education landscape, creating emotional connections is essential for engaging potential students. Student marketing videos are a powerful tool to build these connections, making your institution stand out. Here’s how you can use videos to evoke emotions and drive engagement.

1. Highlight Personal Student Stories

Featuring personal stories of current students is one of the most effective ways to connect emotionally. Showcase their unique journeys, the challenges they’ve faced, and their successes. These authentic narratives are relatable and can stir powerful emotions, making your content memorable. read more

Video marketing is a powerful tool for universities to engage with their audience and enhance their higher education marketing efforts. Here are some Best Practices for University Video Marketing.

Understand Your Audience

Before creating video content, it’s crucial to understand your audience. This includes prospective students, current students, alumni, and stakeholders. Each group has different interests and needs. Tailor your video content to address these varied interests effectively.

Set Clear Objectives

Define the goals of your video marketing efforts. Common objectives include increasing enrollment, improving student engagement, and boosting alumni involvement. Clear objectives will guide your content creation and help measure success. read more

Engaging alumni is crucial for higher education institutions to build a strong community and encourage contributions. Video content is a powerful tool to reconnect with alumni and keep them involved. Here’s how to effectively use video to boost alumni engagement.

Showcase Alumni Success Stories

Highlighting the achievements of your alumni is a great way to foster pride and connection. Create videos that feature alumni sharing their career journeys, accomplishments, and how their education contributed to their success. These stories can inspire other alumni and current students. read more

Creating compelling video content is only half the battle; ensuring it reaches and engages your target audience is equally crucial. The digital landscape offers a plethora of platforms and channels for video content distribution, each with its unique advantages and audience demographics. This article provides an overview of the best platforms and channels for distributing your video content, from social media to email marketing, to maximize reach and engagement.

Video Marketing Channel’s You Need to Know About

  • Social media channels
  • Website and blog
  • Email marketing
  • Video hosting platforms
  • Paid advertising
  • Influencers collaborations

Social Media Channels

  • YouTube: The quintessential video-sharing website, YouTube, is ideal for long-form content, tutorials, and storytelling. With its vast user base, YouTube not only helps in reaching a wide audience but also in SEO, as Google often prioritizes video content in search results.
  • Facebook: With its emphasis on community and sharing, Facebook is great for both short and long-form videos. Live videos on Facebook can particularly boost engagement, offering real-time interaction with viewers.
  • Instagram: Perfect for short, captivating videos, Instagram’s Stories, Reels, and IGTV cater to different types of video content, from quick snippets to longer, more detailed pieces. The platform’s visual nature makes it ideal for brand storytelling and product showcases.
  • Twitter: Best suited for timely, newsworthy, or promotional short videos, Twitter can help increase engagement through retweets and replies, facilitating direct conversations with your audience.
  • LinkedIn: Ideal for B2B marketing, LinkedIn supports professional content, including company updates, product demos, and expert interviews, helping build authority and professional relationships.
  • TikTok: Known for its highly engaging and viral short-form videos, TikTok is perfect for creative, entertaining, and easily digestible content. The platform’s algorithm helps in discovering and reaching a younger, global audience, making it ideal for brand awareness and influencer collaborations.

Website and Blog

Embedding videos directly on your website or blog can enhance user engagement, increase the time spent on the site, and improve SEO. Video content can complement written content, offering a more dynamic way to present information and keep visitors engaged. read more

Understanding your audience is the cornerstone of any successful video marketing strategy. In today’s digital landscape, the abundance of data available offers unprecedented opportunities to gain deep insights into audience preferences and behaviours. This guide explores how to harness audience insights to refine your video content strategies, using analytics tools, social listening, and direct feedback.

The Importance of Audience Insights

Audience insights help you tailor your video content to meet the specific needs and preferences of your target viewers. By understanding who your audience is and what they care about, you can create more engaging and effective video content that resonates on a deeper level, drives engagement, and fosters brand loyalty. read more

In the quest to create compelling and effective video content, direct feedback from your target audience can be invaluable. Surveys and focus groups are two powerful tools that can provide this feedback, offering insights into viewer preferences, content engagement, and areas for improvement. This practical guide delves into how to design and implement surveys and focus groups specifically aimed at enhancing video content.

The Value of Surveys and Focus Groups

Both surveys and focus groups allow you to gather qualitative and quantitative data directly from your audience. While surveys can quantify preferences and behaviors across a broad audience, focus groups provide deeper insights into the reasons behind those preferences, enabling a more nuanced understanding of your audience’s needs. read more

In the crowded digital landscape, creating great video content isn’t enough; your videos must also be easily discoverable by your target audience. This is where Video Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. Video SEO involves optimizing your video content to increase its visibility and ranking on search engines like Google as well as on video platforms like YouTube. This article outlines effective strategies for enhancing your video SEO to ensure your content reaches the widest possible audience. read more

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, video stands out as one of the most engaging and impactful forms of content. However, creating compelling video content is only part of the equation. To truly maximize its potential, marketers must also leverage analytics to gauge video performance, understand audience behavior, and refine their content strategies accordingly. This article explores how to effectively utilize analytics in video marketing to enhance your content’s reach, engagement, and overall impact. read more

Welcome to the world of TV pilot production, where creativity meets strategy and innovation sparks in every frame. As the co-founder and chief creative officer of Clearhead, I understand the importance of making a lasting impact in the entertainment industry. MIPCOM, the global market for entertainment content, is your stage to shine. In this article, we’ll delve into the essential aspects of producing TV pilots and how to navigate MIPCOM successfully. Let’s embark on this creative journey together. read more

When we create new content, social media can sometimes be an afterthought. Used to promote our new content or repost some old stuff to get more ROI from it. The world has changed, and audience behavior and habits have too. With attention spans shortening, we need to create engaging social-first content!

So before we do anything we need to ask ourselves some questions:

1. What are we trying to achieve? Recruit more students, boost engagement, and communicate a brand message?
2. Who are we trying to reach?
3. What does our audience want to see from us?
4. What does our audience think of us? read more

How could we possibly film anything during a global pandemic that banned social contact, limited locations, and encouraged people not to leave their homes? Well, we’ve had to learn to adapt - yes, we may not be jetting off to Amsterdam or Portugal to shoot any time soon, but we have learned to utilise the restrictions and still make some award-winning content. But how?

If there is one thing that we’ve learned here at Clearhead about Virtual Events in 2020 is that they won’t be going away anytime soon.

10 tips on approaching animation the right way. As any author will tell you, the blank page is intimidating. This is often what makes creating high quality animation such a challenge for business’, it is the blank page of film making.

Following the governments extensive advise, we wanted to try and create a simple COVID-19 guide to help keep everyone safe! You can use this to inform your own risk assessments or even download our full ‘Production Guidelines’ document on the link below!

To make sure that you can setup and launch your Virtual Open Day successfully, we have put together our Top Tips for engaging prospective students with your Virtual Open Day.

10 tips on how to repurpose your video content.

One of the key ingredients for any successful film is a good script. This requires combining your marketing objectives with creative ideas, which may seem like a challenge when every member of your team has a different idea about what is required.

Effective video marketing by colleges and universities. Our continual aim at Clearhead is to create chemistry and produce effective video content and campaign for our education clients. We are passionate about doing so and believe in the power of storytelling through the medium of film. Connecting emotively to instigate engagement, form affinity and establish loyalty. We are constantly inspired by content for colleges and universities across the world and wanted to share some content we believe applies the value mentioned above. Producing effective video marketing by colleges and universities. read more

Video Marketing Tips for Leisure and Tourism

8 video marketing tips for tech scale ups

Good stories can help people feel as though they’re sharing your experience in person, and this offers your destination an exciting opportunity to differentiate your stories from other destinations’. Make your stories about much more than just a list of must-do highlights; share emotions and feelings to help consumers build deeper connections with the people and places in your destinations.

The objective for destination marketing strategies will remain focused on promoting attractive and aspirational lifestyle experiences. People want to visit destinations to experience relaxation, adventure, culture and ultimately something new, unique and a place where they can dream with their eyes wide open. read more

Be brave

We will always encourage you to be brave with your advertising whatever brand you have. Whether you are the owner or the marketing/social team we encourage you to push the creativity to the maximum (which could be more cost effective than you think)! We will always expand the creative possibilities and give you opportunities to show us examples that you like. Now this doesn’t have to be anything to do with your type of health and beauty brand, nor does it have to be anything to do with health and beauty at all! It could be a film sequence in the cinema you liked, an ad that you saw on telly. Or just a YouTube ad you saw yesterday! Anything is possible! read more

What education video marketing trends will affect FE and HE marketers in the next 12 months? If you’re planning your content or video strategy for 2019, these are the three things to take into account.

50% of the emotional impact of your video marketing is powered by the soundtrack, so don’t make music a mere afterthought.

Would the Jaws trailer be as creepy without the theme tune? Can you imagine Star Wars starting without the ‘Imperial March’? And would you feel the same level of anticipation for each Game of Thrones episode without the harrowing cello notes accompanying the title sequence?

Music is as much part of the experience of immersing yourself in screen-based action as the visuals. Yet, because it works on a more unconscious level, we rarely attribute its power correctly. As a result, when marketers come to create promotional videos, the music is often considered an afterthought, something that can be added at the end. read more

The Hero Help Hub Framework details the three types of video content you need to effectively promote your brand.

Producing a promotional film that complements your marketing campaign can be your biggest challenge and also your company’s biggest accomplishment. Now your campaign and content is out there in the world, is it making the right impression?

We use up to eight metrics to answer your video marketing ROI questions. Four evaluate the performance of the video asset itself, and all of them are almost always relevant. The other four evaluate against your business objectives, and one or two are usually most relevant for each project. read more

Does each video you create have a Launch Plan? Here’s why you need one and how we can help.

Creating video content is just the first half of the job. Getting it in front of your target audience, in the right way, is the second half.

Not having a launch plan is like baking a cake but neglecting to serve it up. It might taste great – it might be the most delicious cake in the world – but who cares, if no-one gets to eat it?!

Similarly, your video content can only set the hearts and minds of your target audience aflame if they see it. We’ll help make it happen with our choice of three service levels: read more

Looking for new video marketing ideas?

Colleges and university marketing teams constantly tell us they want to start using more video as part of their marketing strategies, but that they lack creative ideas. That’s inspired us to put together this blog, sharing how video can target students and influencers at every stage of their journey. And, just as importantly, that distribution is also a vital consideration that should go hand-in-hand when planning your new creative video content.

We’ve packaged together some of the best examples of video marketing ideas from brands, colleges and universities around the world, and some of our own handiwork that we are most proud of. read more

Just 18% of brands judge their video marketing ROI as “very successful”, according to a Hubspot survey. So how can colleges and universities prove their video marketing delivers genuine ROI?

Fifty-two percent of marketers consider video marketing to be the type of online content with the greatest ROI. Yet, we often find that one of our clients’ main challenges is measuring their video marketing ROI. If you spend £16,000 on a promotional film, how can your college or university marketing team know what impact it has had? And what about the impact of paid social campaigns? read more

Video is expected to account for over 69% of all consumer web traffic in 2017. Get ready now by ensuring your next school, college or university promotional video maximises impact and gets results. These are our top tips for high impact video in the education sector.

Is your marketing where your audience is?

Education marketers looking to target Generation Z (under 20s) are alienating prospective students if they don’t incorporate video as a core part of their marketing mix.

This generation prefer visual communications. YouTube is their favourite website. 93% visit the site at least once per week, while 54% use it multiple times every single day[1]. read more

Filmed interviews are used to convey information and experiences directly to the camera.

And from high-rolling executives, blasé faire musicians, through to excitable university students, every interview we’ve done for one of our films has been different.

Nevertheless there are a set of guidelines we follow that help get the best from each interviewee. If you are looking to capture ‘talking heads’ footage, we recommend the following:

Keep it impromptu

Filmed interviews are most engaging when they feel natural and conversational. If your interviewee knows the exact questions you will ask, they may deliver scripted answers that sound forced. Sure, let them know the topics you will cover and what kind of questions you will ask, but don’t share everything before the camera rolls. read more

Is video optimisation part of your distribution and promotion strategy?

Great video content is useless if your target audience can’t find it. The following ten tips will give your promotional videos the best possible chance to get in front of the right eyeballs online.

Video Optimisation Step 1. Choose the right hosting option

YouTube may be the default platform for video, but it is not always in your interests to use it. If your video contains educational content that’s intended to address a search query, then host it on your own website. Otherwise the search engines will credit YouTube, not your domain, for your video on ‘how to choose the best course during clearing’. read more

Are you thinking about throwing out your printed prospectus and taking everything digital? We’ve got eight questions (and some surprising data) for you to ponder first…

1. Do prospective students prefer printed prospectuses?

According to a study featured in the Guardian in 2013, 62% of 16 to 24-year-olds would rather read a printed book than a digital one. 51% of the 16-24 year olds who prefer printed books said that they like to hold them, while others mentioned liking the smell. The original study was based on a sample of 1,420 young adults. Later, when the newspaper ran their own online poll, the ratio rose to 79% in favour of print over digital for people of all ages. read more

In the digital age, video content marketing has become a key strategy for businesses aiming to captivate and connect with their audiences. This guide cuts through the complexity of developing an effective video marketing approach, covering essential steps from defining objectives to crafting compelling content, and analysing its impact. Perfect for marketers, at any level, looking to leverage video content to achieve your business goals. Ensuring that your message reaches and truly resonates with your target audience. read more

Having a University Video Strategy ensures that your film content has a specific purpose. Without this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating videos just for the sake of it – and missing out on its full potential.

Any video content is good, right?

Statistics comparing the effectiveness of video to other formats are striking. Text and images are mere sparklers compared to video’s fireworks. You want to get attention? Generate engagement? Motivate shares and conversions? Video outperforms other formats on all of these. read more