Editor’s Note: This post is a bit of an outlier in terms of our core audience of families and students applying to boarding schools. We’ve always enjoyed and written with boarding school admission officers & school administrators in mind. This post by Mark Murrell of Mark Interactive & Hyde School connects these two sides of the same coin- families learning and participating in the larger boarding school discussion and schools producing the content that informs and furthers the discussion.

We connected with Mark through his work for the Hyde School, specifically a story and accompanying video that give life to Hyde’s new artificial turf athletic field.  The field itself grew out of a classic boarding school connection:

“…After researching various synthetic turf field companies, the school decided to work with Sports Turf International, which is owned by Eric Lenardson, a father of a Hyde graduate, whose wife is employed at the school. Hyde School administrators expressed gratitude for the generosity of Lenardson and his family, who agreed to build the field for a reduced price….”

Mark advocates that these traditional boarding school relationships can, and must be  fostered & strengthened through modern media.

How do I engage my readers at Hyde School? That it is the first question I ask myself when creating press releases or promotional content for a boarding school event. In order to attract readers I must use rich media.

QUIT TYPING AND START FILMING
You have only a few seconds to captivate your audience. Unless you are Stephen King, you will most likely fail at engaging your audience via copy alone. Even those releases that area accompanied by a photograph fall short of drawing in the audience.

Choose any of your favorite news sites and you will find that video and podcasting are prevalent on every single page. Everyday new tools are discovered on the Internet that deliver messages with greater impact. Boarding schools need to leverage these tools to further engage their audience and join the NEW way of communicating if they want to compete for their audiences time.

BENEFITS TO USING RICH MEDIA TO DELIVER YOUR MESSAGE

1. Personality: imagine the impact to your audience when a student delivers news through online video. Not only are you using an engaging method, but you are giving an inside look into the personality of your greatest assets, your students and faculty.

2. Relationships: boarding school development offices rely on communications to continuously build relationships with alumni. Building the right to ask is a difficult task, but using video to showcase the results of capital campaigns will help strengthen those efforts.

3. Viral: According to Pew Internet 57% of online video viewers share videos with their friends and 75% of internet users say they receive links to view online videos.

4. Easy distribution: social media tools make it easy to distribute your videos in just a few clicks. Suddenly, your message can be found on sites that receive millions of viewers each day.

5. Broaden the scope of how you are found: search engines list video results in search queries, giving you the opportunity to attract new prospects in an entirely unique way.

KISS: Keep it Simple Sweetie
There is a reason why Twitter limits updates to 140 characters; it is to challenge us to get our message out in a clear and succinct manner. In the world of text messaging and status updates, it becomes more and more challenging to deliver a message in a way that is easily consumable.

When developing your videos, keep them short. The average American is subjected to over 3000 marketing messages per day, so you have some competition. If you want to be seen and heard you must be entertaining, relevant, and succinct.

In the end, you are providing a richer experience for your audience. Whether you are reporting on the development of a new building or a school trip, use of video will bring more life to your message, and your audience will be more apt to receive and retain your message.

GET TO WORK!

About Mark Murrell
As the former director & current consultant to Hyde School, Mark’s responsible for web, new media, and video initiatives for the organization. Mark currently heads Mark Interactive, an agency specializing in building web marketing strategies that generate business growth.