Student recruitment videos are quickly becoming the most popular student recruitment tool among universities, colleges and training providers, not only across the UK, but around the world too.

Marketers understand that if you want to get your institution and its courses noticed, producing good student recruitment videos is the most powerful and cost effective way to do so. Video will engage prospective students far more than the written word ever can, helping you to compete in a highly competitive student marketplace and crowded online world.

Thanks to falling video production costs, universities, colleges and training providers, large and small, can afford and benefit from creating student recruitment videos. Once produced, these videos can then be very easily incorporated into websites, propagated online via video-sharing sites and social-networks, and burnt onto DVDs for use at careers fairs and recruitment events.

However, it is a mistake to treat a student recruitment video, as you would a prospectus. That’s not to say that a printed or online prospectus isn’t a valuable tool. It is. But detailed information about an institution or its courses has very little place in a recruitment video. Not if you want people to watch and remember it.

A video should be used to show prospective students what you have to offer, not just tell them about it. Prospective students want to see what the facilities, buildings and grounds look like; they want to meet the people they’ll be learning with, taught by and possibly living with; and they want get a feel for the place before applying. They might be seeking out information, but they don’t want to be bombarded with a list of statistics.

Prospective students want the information to be presented to them in a way they can relate to and engage with. They have hundreds, possibly thousands of educational options to choose from and don’t have the time to be patronised or bored. Also, as irritating as the saying might be, in this case it’s right. Less is definitely more. Online films over 5-minutes in length are very rarely watched all the way through, so it’s always better to produce shorter student recruitment videos.

Production values are important too. Amateurish videos suggest, well … amateurish institutions. A badly edited student recruitment video, packed with statistics, with no discernable narrative, poor direction and terrible sound quality, will always reflect badly. If the video is poor, prospective students will naturally expect the same of your institutions and courses. But producing student recruitment videos is a craft that requires experience, knowledge and technical expertise; so in most cases is best left to professional video production companies.

Long gone are the days when student recruitments videos took longer to load, than it did to read an entire prospectus. The vast majority of prospective students watch good quality online video everyday and their sophisticated tastes must be catered for. Just remember, the back button is not very far away.

Bad studio recruitment videos aren’t just a waste of time and money. They can do serious damage to your reputation.