3. Take a look at St. Clair Colleges website. In relation to visuals, what would you propose to St. Clair College to improve/enhance this new website to effectively market to potential incoming local domestic students. Please provide three (3) recommendations and justify your answer with detailed reasoning. (9 Marks)
1. Firstly, what I would propose to St.Clair College for implementing more visuals for their website in regards to marketing to domestic students would be the use of more infographics within their website. As it stands, their main website already has plenty of effective visuals throughout. All the imagery within their main site is relevant to both international and domestic students. For example, it contains photos of happy students and shots of inside the campus. While this is fine the way it is, to more effectively market to potential incoming local domestic students to use infographics that contain relevant information to them. At the moment, at least on their main page, there are no infographics and they could do a better job at displaying what information would be relevant to domestic students. This infographic should contain relevant information to domestic students, such as financial aid, Campus life, extra-curriculars, college reputation, and college programs. Currently, it is still possible to find all this information on their site, but it is all hidden with links and text. By implementing infographics, the college will see an increase in viewership. This with infographics that resonate with domestic students will see more domestic students engage with the site and encourage more to come. This holds, as discussed in class, infographics can improve traffic by 14%. Furthermore, infographics can easily be more digestible and better retained than in blocks of text. As stated previously, the current website has all the information that is relevant to domestic students. A lot of the information that needs to be conveyed to domestic students is a lot, which makes sense why there seem to be lines of text. This comes with the downside of turning away domestic students. With Infographics, this alleviates this issue. Infographics allow information to be considered with limited text with imagery, therefore, it will be more easily understood and remembered. As discussed in class, the use of visual content is more easily retained than written. This means that for the college domestic students will more easily won’t forget the college’s message faster.
2. Another recommendation that I have for St.Clair in their website marketing efforts is to utilize more videos. To market more effectively to domestic students, a video containing relevant content that would grab their attention and captivate them. For instance, this could be a place to put one that would be effective on their landing page. As it stands, in terms of visuals, the current landing page for St. Clair College’s Open House 2024 does an effective job of utilizing them. There are plenty of visuals throughout that should resonate with students and convey information. For example, they have visuals of students and what the campus looks like. These do a good job of marketing to students because they allow students to see themselves in the picture of the students inside the video. This is more effective than using text to describe what a student is. This holds; as discussed in class, the use of videos within landing pages resonates with people 40% better. This means that using videos will ensure that they will stay on the page longer and watch the video. Beyond this, another benefit of implementing videos on their site is that it has the potential to increase viewership. This is because a high-quality video containing relevant information that will resonate with domestic students will be more likely to be shared. To illustrate, a video that they find captivating will encourage them to share with their friends as well. This is the case because as discussed in class, it is 40x more likely to be shared. What this entails is that having a video that relates to domestic students, will encourage them to share it with more of their domestic student friends, and therefore increase shareability and website viewership. Lastly, a video on their landing page that is relevant to domestic students, has the benefit of users filling the call to action of the college. For the College, it may be, having domestic students fill out a registration form, signing up for a giveaway, or purchasing college merch. As mentioned previously, visual content resonates with users and establishes a connection with them, as such, they will be more included to do what you want them to do. How the college can use a video for this would be if they had one related to student life and prompt them to fill out a registration form for an open house afterward. As discussed in class, this will improve conversion rates by 86%.
3. Finally, I last proposed to St. Clair for visuals on their website to use more interactive content on their site. Aside from more infographics and static images, other ways they can use more visuals in their website to add more interactive content like clickable slideshows. The main website for St. Clair is cluttered with a plethora of important information that students know about the college. Such as important news and mental Health Supports, and Apply for the next Semester. The problem that I see is that for aesthetic purposes the images are behind an opaque color filter which is ugly. They did this so that the conformation was condensed rather than using blocks of text. However, this could be improved. To market to domestic students, I would display this same content as it is relevant to them, but change it to a clickable slideshow format. I propose they place this slideshow in the featured section so it will be the first thing they see. This will yield a couple of benefits for St.Clair if they choose to do this. As stated before, they will easily remember the information. A lot of information is key to remember so by utilizing this, they will be more likely to retain the information better. Two, they will spend more time on their website. As discussed in class, websites with good visual content see 100x more time on the page. This is critical because this means that they can put information on the slides and users are more likely to read it. To solidify this fact, as per class discussions, the human brain processes information 60,000x faster than text. Therefore, when we convey messaging to domestic students, while it will be a lot because of the nature of the college, they won’t be turned away quickly if we use this type of visual content.
Overall, I propose all of these visuals to further enhance their efforts to market to domestic students so that the bounce rate will remain low, they will have high engagement and conversion levels, and the viewership will increase because users will be more inclined to share this site to other domestic students.
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