The New Strategic

Imperative for
Marketing: How to
Advertise to High
School Students
without Wasting Your
Media Spend
 1. Using Behind-the-
Scenes Video Tours
 A behind-the-scenes tour allows you to showcase the
aspects of your school that might otherwise be missed
or underrepresented on your website alone.
• general energy of your students and faculty members,
• range of athletics teams, activities, and clubs you have on offer
• special events
• prospects with tours of your academic departments,
• share video testimonials of your current students discussing or
showcasing their own experiences in creative ways.

https://youtu.be/bWALeumwAfA?
list=PL_voamVqJ_Zy3qYG5x0XorubWdP
jrwM3r
With video tours, your school has the opportunity of
presenting your campus passively, showing off various
locations of your campus

Example: In this Instagram Reel

from the University of Florida, a
student casually skateboards
around campus while waving a
flag in support of the school
“Gators” team. The video
managed to attract nearly 80,000
views.
Using a similar approach, the UF College of the Arts has created
dozens of highly successful TikTok videos of students “Chad and
Emma” dancing around campus, with most receiving more than
10,000 likes – such as the one seen below:

Making the effort to

create a series of
videos like these has
the added impact of
keeping viewers
coming back for
more, giving your
school ample
opportunity to
showcase multiple
areas of your campus.
 2. Collaboration with
Your Student
Ambassadors
One of the most effective moves for how to promote a school
on social media to get prospective students excited about
campus life is to involve student influencers in creating
your social media content. Who among these students are
gaining the highest number of views and social interaction…
then collaborate to market the school’s content.

Example: In this video, the student creator tells viewers all

the reasons she’s enamored with Stanford University. This
college social media post idea has attracted more than
17,000 views since being posted last year and is a great
testament to how to promote a school on social media
This student had already gained 10,000 followers by
the time the school recruited her to work with them.
The university has since created an ambassador
program to encourage the most social savvy of its
students to create content through their own social
platforms on behalf of the school, which is one option
when considering how to promote a school on social
media.

Student ambassadors
can also showcase
school events and
activities through
regular social media
posts
The student ambassadors
can even be the subjects of
your social media posts
themselves to help animate
areas of your campus or to
showcase deeper aspects of
student life – as seen in this
Facebook post from Kent
State University,
highlighting one of the
school’s senior student
ambassadors:
 3. Feature Compelling Student
Stories for an Effective Approach
on How to Promote a School on
Social Media 
Featuring student stories on your social media also happens to
be a great way to showcase your school’s campus life. To that
end, your school might choose to work with some of the student
ambassadors you’ve identified, featuring stories of the campus-
life experience from the perspective of students. These “A day
in the life” and “What it’s like to be a student here” stories have
proven to be popular on social media as a next best thing to
shadowing a student in person around campus, and can be
highly effective for influencing prospective students pondering
college options.
 Example: This extended TikTok takes a more playful and
creative approach to the “day in the life” video format for how
to promote a school on social media. It starts with the
preparation of the “not so healthy drink” we see below, then
takes the viewer on a minute long tour of the various spots the
student visits throughout their school day, from the library to the
campus snack shop, and finally onto a bus to a nearby beach to
hang out with friends. All set to music, the video gives viewers
a refreshing overview of campus life at the University of Kent.

Example: Algonquin
Careers Academy in
Ontario, Canada regularly
features the achievements of
students and alumni in its
blogs:
 Some of Instagram’s own tips include
creating videos that are “entertaining, funny,

4. Using TikToks and

and interesting” to make more of an impact
with the Instagram community. Making
content that’s more discoverable and
shareable increases opportunities for your

Instagram Reels  prospects to see your campus, and is an

effective approach for how to promote a
school on social media.

 
Example: The University of Cambridge did a
great job entertaining viewers with this post,
choosing to be creative with the event itself by
lighting up one of its central buildings to
celebrate the milestone of achieving one million
followers on Instagram. The video event was
highly effective for drawing new eyes to the
school campus, attracting more than 144,000
views. 
5. Include Live Streaming
in Your Social Media for
Example: Creighton Community
Schools Strategy School chose to live stream its high
school graduation ceremony as a means

 
of handling COVID restrictions in the
region. While the purpose for live
streaming here may have been more
practically based, the approach in
general is a great way for your prospects
to virtually attend your live events,
gaining a better feel of your campus and
school spirit from this college social
media campaign.
 6. Get Creative with the
Imagery on Your School’s
Those following you on Instagram,
Social Media Posts Facebook, and other social channels can
learn a lot about your school from a
single image, and in many cases, that
Example: This graduation image from
single image can stir emotions even
Georgetown University posted around
Father’s Day doesn’t need much
more effectively than video.

 
explaining, but just in case, you have the
added advantage with your regular social
media posts of adding a description with
emojis and hashtags to increase context and
engagement, heightening the emotional
impact. Here, Georgetown has opted to
keep its description light and sentimental in
nature as a tribute to the occasion.
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING
AND HAVE A GREAT DAY!