Virtual tours are increasingly becoming a core part of education programs and marketing. They help you make a meaningful first impression with prospective students and their families, increase enrollments, and create an immersive virtual environment for both prospective and existing students. These 5 tips can help you integrate virtual tours into your school programs and marketing plan.
Optimize your website with virtual tours
Any educational institution can display pictures of its facility and surroundings. Why not go the extra step with virtual tours? Interactive, multimedia 4D virtual tours will make your website stand out as well as increase your organic traffic.
In effect, you have to be strategic. Here are a few opportunities to link your virtual tour for your audiences to find it easily:
1. Your Homepage
When someone lands on your website from a search engine, you want them to go inside for more. Grab their attention by showcasing a compelling virtual tour of your school along with some thoughtful design and content.
2. Your Visit Page
Offer an easy opportunity to take a from-home 360 virtual tour of your school for potential students signing up for a physical campus visit.
3. Your About Page
Whatever you do, do not make your About page boring. Strive to create a lasting impression on the minds of your prospects so they don’t forget you the moment they close the tab. Inspire them with a virtual tour that tells a story about your school.
Conduct a virtual open day
By taking your school Open Day to a virtual space, you are able to effectively market yourself and reach out to a global potential student pool. Students and their families can access curated content where they go through interactive experiences, such as taking an immersive virtual tour, attending webinars, and asking questions through live Q&A sessions or private chats.
A virtual open day removes barriers such as cost, time, and distance to enable prospective students from all over the world to attend at the click of a button. It achieves the same goals as a traditional open day, but in a much more efficient and engaging way for all.
Learn more about virtual open days: silversea-media.com/how-to-engage-students-at-a-virtual-open-day/
Leverage digital channels
Your virtual tour can be a strong click and conversion driver for almost every digital channel you use to drive student inquiries and applications. When it comes to social media marketing, visuals such as images, videos, and VR experiences have continued to grow as powerful tools for brands looking to communicate easily with their audiences. And that makes social media a perfect fit to market your virtual tour.
Beyond social channels, consider using email messages with optimized Calls to Action. Create a dedicated email campaign to promote your virtual tour and try to include it in your regular newsletters. You might also want to consider adding a link to your virtual tour to every admissions counselor’s email signature.
Level up your educational fair
In this competitive landscape of the education industry, you must know how to stand out in the crowd. At events like school and college fairs, students are faced with a lot of choices that can make them easily distracted. But it doesn’t have to be the case.
Think about a potential student walking up to your booth and seeing a large screen that shows a tour of your campus. Instead of having to look at a generic folded map, they can experience it for themselves. Then, amplify that experience. Consider adding a few VR glasses that allow your booth visitors to truly immerse themselves into the tour and the campus experience. It’s a memorable and significant experience for any student trying to make sense of the countless booths visited during the fair.
Take your students on virtual field trips
Now that the student recruitment season is over, you can still integrate virtual tours into your school programs. With virtual technology, you are no longer limited by the space of the classroom. Virtual field trips provide the perfect opportunity to broaden your students’ minds and bring the world’s greatest sights right into your classroom.
VR lets you explore ancient sites, travel to space, walk with dinosaurs, and take on adventures you never could before. This immersive technology allows teachers to guide students through collections of 360° scenes and 3D objects, pointing out interesting sites and artifacts along the way. By helping your students visualize information in a new way, you can positively impact their ability to retain information.
Learn more about the use of VR in STEAM education: www.silvrgrow.com
