The web is an extremely powerful marketing tool, and empowers companies to engage with an audience of customers like no other medium can. But the web has grown and evolved over the last two decades, and content has become much more rich, interactive and social. In many ways, the audience on the web, which your business may be trying to attract, is much more savvy as a result. Take services like Twitter and Reddit, what these information service providers help people to do is curate and summarise the web. What many people now want is not to be bombarded with information and lots of text to read, but to instead be engaged, entertained and informed quickly, getting the information they need at an instant. Many education websites now take advantage of rich multimedia on their sites in order to provide prospective learners an instant hook to their courses and training services, because without rich content it can be very easy to quickly lose the interest of your audience. And on the web, first impressions really do count for alot, it is simply a part of our human nature.
Video promotion is over 6 times more effective than print and text (b2bmarketing.net)
So what can be achieved by utilising video based multimedia content within your educational website’s design:
1 – Visual Storytelling
Using video on a website can be engaging for your audience and less time consuming than blocks of text to convey your message. Of course, website text is important for your website in order to be visible to search engines, but the design of your landing page is critical to the overall effectiveness of your education website. You may have heard of the term ‘Bounce Rate’, what this means, usually conveyed in percentage terms, is what proportion of the audience to your website leave immediately rather than continuing to other pages. Your landing page needs to perform the task of attracting your audience to learn more about your company and training services. Digital video is a powerful tool to engage your audience, because just one click can feed information about your courses, your facilities and your company’s philosophy and purpose in a colourful, musical and inventive way. Use video to convey a story to captivate your audience, and encourage them to discover more about your online courses.
2 – Effective SEO
We mentioned earlier that the use of text is important for search engine optimisation, but you may not know that video is now taken seriously by Google and other popular search engines when used on sites. The popularity of YouTube is evident that people love to watch videos on the web, but as well as Youtube indexing, what Google now does is index websites across the internet that feature video. What can then happen is if a person were to search for videos on Google using particular keywords, for example College Promotional Videos, then your video could very well appear. Because not everyone takes advantage of video marketing on their sites, it is very likely that your video could hit Page one on Google if it is sharp and well produced.
3 – Open New Avenues To Market
Of course this speaks for itself. People love sharing new content on the internet, especially in the areas that interest them or are associate with their working profession. Many people share content on social media relating to education and learning technology. If you are doing innovative work with elearning courses for learners, or marketing courses produced with engaging elearning design, then showcase it! And the likelihood is that your work will be highlighted through social media, thus attracting more interest and potential customers to your site.
At Discover eLearning, I specialise in creating effective and engaging website design. I support companies to create smart and engaging learning environments, as well as company website to market and brand learning provider businesses. Please visit my projects page to see examples of my work, and if you would like to talk about what Multimedia Enhanced Websites could do for your business, Get in Touch Today
