Creating videos to market your brand is becoming increasingly popular as it is becoming easier for people to watch videos on the go at any time. Although this market is growing, many brands are unable to keep up with the demand by having a video production unit in-house so they must brainstorm and create a plan for their videos before hiring an outside company to produce their vision. The New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University is just one example of a brand with this complex issue.
Casey Pearce, the associate director of external relations and marketing for NYITCOM at Arkansas State, said that one of the drawbacks of not having an in-house team for creating videos is that it can be expensive, but there are also several benefits to creating video marketing materials that make the expense worth it.
“Everybody has video access on them 24/7 now on their phones, there’s an emotional element of storytelling, we’ve become accustomed to watching short clips, and there’s a lot of targeting we can do,” Pearce explained.
The goal for the videos created for NYITCOM at Arkansas State University is to raise brand awareness and they are exclusively used on social media. According to Pearce, it is more cost-effective for his team to target the videos to potential students using social media than it would be to purchase air time on a television network. Although he doesn’t want to be creatively influenced by other schools in the region he considers as the school’s competition for prospective students, Pearce admitted it is important to know what those other schools are saying about themselves and how they are marketing themselves to potential students.
The past year has led many marketing teams to reconsider how they use video and to become more creative with what they produce. One video produced over the past year with the help of a local Jonesboro video production company that Pearce was proud of was a video tour of the building the NYITCOM at Arkansas State University uses for classes.
“We couldn’t have students on campus to give them campus tours,” Pearce said. “They shot using drones traveling down the hallways to show [viewers] our physical campus location. That planning process was… what is it that we most need to highlight about our building, what are the cool things they really need to see, how do we let them feel like they’re in the building? So we sent them a map of our building and showed them all of the most important spots and how we would walk through it.”
Pearce complimented the company on how they storyboarded the idea to map out how the video would be shot and looked before they started filming. His team has used the company for several projects over the years and the company is familiar with the style guides of the school and how best to showcase it for use to market to potential students online.
Since the regions are so different, Pearce enjoys a lot of creative freedom in how to market the NYITCOM at Arkansas State University compared to the main campus in New York but said the main office has helped out with some video projects. Overall Pearce is pleased with how his team and the company they hire are using video in their marketing. The pandemic has changed the approach to video, but the execution of creating is still just as great as it was before the pandemic started.
