Virtual campus tours as part of your school’s marketing and admissions strategy
Introduction
Virtual campus tours have experienced something of a renaissance in recent years, and are now an essential part of the admissions toolkit for many international and boarding schools around the world. Whether you’ve just got a shiny new tour or are considering getting one for your school, our experts have put together some best practices for using virtual school tours as part of your marketing and admissions strategy.
1. Put your virtual tour on your website
This first one is an obvious one, but it needs to be said; make your tour available on your website. Whether you’re embedding it directly, linking to it in another tab or hiding it behind a sign-up form, site visitors need to know that it is there. Your goal here is to make your tour accessible to your viewers and available at a point in their journey at which their interest is high. There are two main strategies for achieving optimal engagement:
a) Make your tour publicly available
This approach ensures that the maximum number of site visitors have access to your tour, providing an additional layer of engagement with your school that prospective families and employees can have before committing to filling out a form, or contacting your admissions team. Early questions can be answered; what does the school actually look like? Can I picture my child in this playground and learning in these science labs? Does this look like a nice place to work?
The best way to reach the most people is to place your tour in prominent and logical locations:
Your main menu - if your site’s menu is not too cluttered, go ahead and add a link to your tour, as our friends at the British School of Bahrain have done. This means that, at any point during their visit, people can check out your campus or be funnelled towards direct contact to your admissions team.
Your homepage - placing your tour on your homepage allows visitors to arrive at your school and immediately have a look at the campus and facilities.
Facilities & academic life pages - these pages conjure an image for visitors of the environment in which their child will be learning, and of the activities that take place, meaning that they are an optimal location to offer further insight into your school with a visit to your tour.
Admissions - if yours supports a live guided option, the key to using your tour on the admissions page is to encourage families to provide contact details for further direct contact with your admissions team, as Nord Anglia’s La Côte International School. If your tour doesn’t have embedded video calls, it is still worth giving people who visit your admissions page another opportunity to have a look at your school. This is best done via a link or on a separate tab - as Geneva English School have done - as it can distract from the all-important contact form.
b) Invite only
The second strategy is to use the tour as a driver for your target demographics to provide you with their contact details. You can do this by placing regular calls to action (CTA’s) around your site, usually in the main menu, admissions pages and sidebar, to provide the most accessibility for visitors to convert to prospects throughout their journey.
There are pros and cons to both strategies and ultimately, the best way to use your tour is to combine both approaches; make your campus as accessible as possible in the virtual world, and convert site visitors into prospective families and employees.
2. Put it on your social media channels
Of course, when you finally publish your brand new tour you’re going to post about it on your social channels, but the vast majority of your social media followers are members of your community. What you really want is newly acquired leads to be visiting your tour and getting enthusiastic about your school. One approach to this is to ensure that you post a tour link to your socials semi-regularly during your admissions phase (or the more sophisticated strategy of advertising your virtual open days, as discussed below).
The second complementary strategy is another seemingly obvious one that marketing and admissions departments often overlook; add your tour link to your bios on social media. Simply adding a link on your social channel’s bios vastly increases the accessibility of your tour to your target demographics and provides another avenue to draw people into your online ecosystem.
3. Virtual Open Days
Whether you are an international school that caters to families from around the world, an elite boarding or private school, or a local fee-paying school, Virtual Open Days are a must-have addition to your admissions strategy in 2022. As the name suggests, virtual tours are an important cornerstone of any school’s Virtual Open Day, increasing the depth of engagement for visitors and allowing them to get the best possible understanding of your community and facilities, without setting foot on your campus.
There are a number of ways to integrate your tour into a successful virtual open day at your school, but at the very least you will want to provide visitors with a digital brochure that directs them to the key locations on your campus, and provides some additional context. Remember that your tour locations will most likely have info cards that provide an overview of each location, so it is nice to provide some community content in the form of written student testimonials, short videos featuring Year Heads or teachers, or image galleries that show the spaces in action.
If your tour supports a live guided tour option, you can go one step further and schedule live sessions where your admissions officers take groups of people around the school in real time, pointing out key USP’s, answering questions and generally providing the personal touch that is often lacking in less interactive virtual open days. While a digital brochure is a good way to engage with prospective families, nothing beats taking a group of people around your school in person and building that all-important rapport and sense of confidence that leads parents to join the admissions process at your school.
4. Include your tour in your admissions package
If you are reading this, you will know that the admissions package is an important part of a prospective family’s journey to becoming a member of your community. At this stage, parents (and their children) will still be considering up to six other schools - depending on your region and target demographics - so it’s important to reinforce your USP’s and remind them of your beautiful campus and amazing facilities as much as possible, without overwhelming them with information. A great way to do this is to include an age-relevant primer of your school with a link to your virtual tour - or do one better and add some branded smartphone headsets so that the prospective family can enjoy a tour of your campus in glorious HDVR!
5. Use it to create additional media
Your virtual campus tour can be an absolute goldmine for generating HD imagery and filling your social media content calendar. If your virtual tour is produced by a school marketing agency, it is likely that the imagery in your tour will be high resolution, and post-processed to a professional level. This means that you can request a cubemap projection of any location in your tour, and receive an HD image that is perfect for a website banner and can be cropped for social media or other digital use.
For those of you wanting to fill your social media content calendars, you can also produce short-form social ready clips of your campus that can be used to highlight new facilities or initiatives, adding depth to your social media strategy and getting your USP’s out there to prospective families.
6. Direct mailing - put it on a postcard!
Many international and private schools include local medium to large businesses in their outreach strategy; businesses who attract international hires and HNW families into their management and leadership. It is always worth building ongoing relationships with these companies, and whether your are committing to more extensive measures like fee reductions or admissions waivers for employees, it can be worth sending out a few postcards to these businesses with a qr code to give you the edge when encouraging new or prospective hires to consider your school. Remember - it’s not just about showing off your facilities, it’s about demonstrating that you are a forward-thinking school who embraces innovative methods of communication to set yourself apart from your competition. Similarly to your admissions package, you can also go a step further and include branded cardboard VR smartphone headsets that are guaranteed to get eyes on your tour!
7. Live guided admissions tours
Campus closures and travel restrictions may soon be a thing of the past, but online admissions meetings are here to stay. Everyone who has conducted an online tour with a prospective family will know the struggle of navigating the wifi hotspots on your campus while walking around your school with your phone or tablet, pointing out USP’s and answering questions while trying not to interrupt each other. The truth is, no matter how good it is, it’s never going to be that good. Far better, then, to be comfortably seated in your office with its solid internet connection while chatting with a prospective new family while looking at your virtual campus tour together. Until recently, the only way to do this was by opening the tour on your computer and sharing your screen. This is enough to give viewers an idea of your facilities, and allow you to deliver your usual in-person tour spiel, but it’s also not perfect; the resolution of the panoramas is reduced, and it can be lagger. With the advent of live guided tours, all of these issues become a thing of the past! Your prospective families can join you on a video chat directly within the tour, allowing all participants to view the tour in their own browser - interacting with the tour elements while chatting with your admissions team in person.
8. Bonus option - virtual school tours at recruitment fairs
It might seem counterintuitive, but virtual campus tours have their place at recruitment fairs as well. Having a tour set up on a screen at your booth gives you the opportunity to chat with prospective new staff about your facilities while actually walking them through your campus, making it easier for people to picture themselves as part of your community. Once again, if you have some branded smartphone VR headsets with you, it is a fun way to attract people to your booth, and gives them something to take home with them that is a bit more memorable than the usual pen-with-a-logo-on-it or usb stick!