Students at the New York Film Academy represent a wide variety of demographics in terms of age, nationality, and background. The one thing every student there shares is simple: they are passionate about film.
Luckily for the school’s marketing department, this fact gives their marketing efforts—aimed at attracting new students—an easy focus. Even more lucky for them, their school comes equipped with the talent and equipment for producing what many schools and businesses find to be the most difficult and expensive form of content marketing: videos.
Matthew Zaffina explains, “We have a lot of talent here in our student body, and we also have the resources and infrastructure to create great films.”
The nature of the hands-on programs at the New York Film Academy means that students are making entertaining and intriguing videos every semester within their classes. The school makes these student videos available for anyone to view on YouTube, giving curious film lovers a chance to see the skills of current students.
“It’s a very good indicator of what potential students will get out of it…They can see what the result of a program will get you,” says Zaffina.
Additionally, the skilled staff helps with putting together promotional videos that showcase the kinds of courses offered and the experience students are having there. As the academy has an interest in recruiting internationally, some of these videos are created in foreign languages, highlighting students from outside the United States, to demonstrate to international prospective students how welcome they will be.
That desire to attract students internationally is part of the reason the school places such a value on developing a wide-reaching online presence. While including video in their content marketing efforts is a no-brainer for a world-class film school, the marketing team doesn’t stop there.
“We make it a point to use all the channels at our disposal pretty equally,” insists Zaffina. In fact, one of the content marketing success stories he describes is a Batman infographic they created that went viral. The infographic spread to many sites on the web after getting picked up by the popular site Mashable.
Did it explain to potential students the skill sets they’d be gaining in the classes at the academy? Nope.
Is it a really interesting and fun infographic for anyone into the Batman movies? For sure.
The infographic therefore appealed directly to the school’s target audience, or at least some segment of it, and touched on a subject interesting enough to a wide range of internet users to spread far beyond the school’s own blog.
Speaking of the school’s blog, the site is updated regularly. Professors and students sometimes contribute posts alongside the marketing team. The blog gives the school the chance to highlight interesting events they put on, notable speakers they bring to campus (the nature of the school means they have a number of famous and talented alumni), and impressive work faculty and students create.
Through these various forms, the New York Film Academy’s content strategy provides prospective students with a glimpse into the value they’d get out of the program, and gives film lovers of all types content to get excited about.
