One of the main benefits of providing virtual tours is that it provides an accessible way for foreign students to view your university and its facilities from abroad. Due to financial and time constraints it is often not possible for international students to visit a campus in person from abroad before making their selection decision, in fact the majority choose a university without ever having visited in person.
By providing the opportunity for them to experience everything your university has to offer virtually you will stand out from competing institutions who provide far less immersive and engaging digital content on what university life will involve.
Furthermore, it also offers these students the opportunity to share the university tour experience with key influencers of their selection process such as parents, family and friends, all whom may play an important role in their ultimate decision.
How 360-degree video ad looks like:
This is real example posted by the Seattle Pacific University’s channel on YouTube.
Nice, isn’t it?
Well, it’s cool but it’s could be better. Evaluate the following reasons:
- Embed a video from Youtube in a website (let’s said a blog about students) only will increase the traffic of your YouTube Channel. Why? Because every time when a user click on the video, they will go directly to your Youtube channel. However, you need these users go to your website, where you can attract them to apply to your programs.
- YouTube will only give you the information about how many times the video was played. Nothing else. This is not enough because the most useful KPI that you need to measure the sucess of a campaign, it is the number of clicks that the users did. An less, the only concern that you have is the awareness of your brand.
- If somebody embed your video, well, it’s hard to know where this video is hosted. From the brand safety perspective, this is really important. What happen if your video is running in an inappropriate website?
- If you set a campaign on Youtube, you only will be capable to show “banners” over any of the millions of videos watched by the users. Of course, it’s possible to define a targeting criteria, however, this conditions are not that good on this platform and eventually, you can see your banner over a video about puppies, ghosts, car accidents, jokes, among many other type of content that it could affects negatively your brand.
- Certainly it is possible to set a campaign of video pre-roll in Youtube. BUT, this platform has not developed yet the ability to show 360-degree videos as a pre-rolls ads.
- All the previous comments applies for Facebook too.
What is a suitable solution?
Run your 360-degree video ads in a network specialized on immersive marketing. Why?
- If you really worried about brand safety, you should choose a closed video network. That’s means that the network runs the ads on a certain number of websites where it’s possible to control and supervise the quality of the content.
- Additionally, you should choose a network capable to show your banners over your 360-degree videos. This is probably the most important key, because users can “click” on a banner and you will know exactly how many of them are reaching your website. We are talking about to measure “effectiveness” and why is this important? Because at the end of the day, this is the only way to know the campaign’s ROI.
- Ask about “exclusiveness”. This will guarantee that your ads will only appears in your own branded content videos, not in other videos made for automotive, travel, etc. Your branded video, your banner.
Interested? Write: [email protected]