Higher Ed Storytelling University

00:00:00:05 - 00:00:21:10
John Azoni
My guest today is Matt Hames. Matt is a marketer and digital media explorer. He thinks about how the newly aware engage with organic digital content he does communication strategy at three enrollment marketing and runs digital labs at three. A deep dive into the digital presence of an institution of higher education. So Matt, welcome to the show.

00:00:21:20 - 00:00:24:03
Matt Hames
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

00:00:24:15 - 00:00:43:16
John Azoni
Absolutely. So we're talking about YouTube today, how to be effective on YouTube, how to reach prospective students, move them down the funnel, What are the strategies and tactics that go into that? I've actually recommended to you a couple of times that people who have reached out to me wondering about, you know, YouTube strategy and things like that. So I thought, you know, let's just get this guy on the show.

00:00:44:04 - 00:00:47:04
Matt Hames
I appreciate the recommendations. That's awesome. Thank you so much.

00:00:47:15 - 00:00:55:22
John Azoni
Yeah. So before we dive into that, I like to start off on a non higher ed note. And I don't know if a lot of people know this about you, but you are a curler.

00:00:56:06 - 00:01:26:22
Matt Hames
That is correct. Curling. Yes. Well, as a card carrying Canadian. So I'm a Canadian-American. I'm citizenship of both countries, but as a Canadian. A lot of people think that hockey is Canada's sport, but curling is the sport that Canadians do. So in a country of about 35 million people, there's anywhere from two and a half to 3 million people who go curling in Canada, which means if you're walking down the street and you bump into one person, you have a 10% chance that they're a curler.

00:01:27:09 - 00:02:02:20
Matt Hames
So when I lived in Canada, I traveled around the country. I was fortunate enough to be sponsored by a beer company and some other companies, and we got to travel around Canada going curling. So I've been to places like Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and Halifax, Nova Scotia and Cologne in British Columbia. It's awesome. I got to travel all around and when I moved to the U.S., I kept curling and I did some coaching and I was the coach of the U.S. men's national team at the World Championships in Basel, Switzerland, which was a great experience.

00:02:02:20 - 00:02:18:10
Matt Hames
Yeah, so I still do it. And here's a plug. If you Google curling near me, there is a place near you in the US, so go. It's a lot of fun. It's a reason to look forward to winter and it's just a tremendous good time.

00:02:18:21 - 00:02:26:22
John Azoni
That's because my next point was going to be, I think in America, people like dream of curling, but no one actually knows where to go to do it, right?

00:02:26:22 - 00:02:48:03
Matt Hames
Yeah, there's a curling club in every state, including Hawaii. So give it a try. Find the nearest place near you. It's awesome for team building the women's ice hockey team at Colgate University, which is right near me, went to our curling club and I taught them how to curl and it was like a really fun team building thing for them.

00:02:48:12 - 00:02:59:06
Matt Hames
It's a really fun team building thing for your team as well. Just go and try it like nobody's good at curling at the very beginning. So it's really super fun. Just kind of experience it together.

00:02:59:16 - 00:03:02:02
John Azoni
If you're good at Bocce Ball, would you be good at curling?

00:03:02:18 - 00:03:23:23
Matt Hames
You know, I liken it to the Scottish invented three games curling golf and this game called hurling which never caught on. Nobody is naturally good at curling or golf. Like the first time that they try it, they're awful. They're both repetitive sports, so you just have to repeat it. That's it. So it's fun. It's a fun sport to try.

00:03:24:05 - 00:03:30:06
John Azoni
Awesome. Okay, so Matt, give us a brief introduction to three enrollment marketing in your role there.

00:03:30:18 - 00:04:01:06
Matt Hames
Yeah, great. Thanks for asking. We actually celebrated our birthday on February 1st. Officially, we started February 1st, 2019, and the founders of three, a bunch of people had a vision of how can we generate awareness better for higher education institutions, How can we better engage people and how can we better deliver engaged people to an admissions counselor? So in other words, if you email 100 people, you know, just four simple numbers.

00:04:01:06 - 00:04:31:20
Matt Hames
If you engage 100 people via ads or emails or digital marketing, how do you then deliver the most highly engaged people to the admissions counselor to follow up with some people who have applied, who also have a really high engagement scores, people who are more interested. So that's really the solution that we offer. At three, we is a bunch of different techniques, retail marketing techniques, smart email campaigning, where if you open an email, you get another email.

00:04:31:20 - 00:04:50:18
Matt Hames
If you click on an email, you get another email landing pages that are designed to generate behaviors. So all that happens on the other side of three. Where I come in is I go into institutions and I say, when people are newly aware, here is what they are doing. They are going to Google and typing in your name.

00:04:50:18 - 00:05:12:14
Matt Hames
They are going to YouTube and typing in your name. They are going to Facebook and typing in your name. Here's what they see at different points in the enrollment cycle. Here's how you can optimize what you create. So that is being delivered and seen by more people and organic. And I come in and say we are generating a lot of awareness for your institution.

00:05:13:03 - 00:05:34:12
Matt Hames
What happens when you generate that awareness and where do people go? So that's really where it comes in For me. We think about a couple of different things. We think about subject matter experts at three. So there's a bunch of people who are super smart in SEO and CRM and getting emails delivered into the inbox and the creation of content.

00:05:34:21 - 00:05:43:13
Matt Hames
Where my expertise comes in is in how the newly aware discover more. And that's basically it.

00:05:43:13 - 00:06:06:07
John Azoni
Yeah, exactly. And that's one thing I have gleaned from you in just your LinkedIn content and stuff like that. One of the things this was not even necessarily related to YouTube, but you know, the dot edu is not your only website and you should have a lot of websites. You know, you should be optimizing all these different platforms that you're on to get people who are interested to learn more, go deeper.

00:06:06:19 - 00:06:28:11
Matt Hames
Yeah, yeah. My argument is basically and it's a semantic argument, I admit it, but I'm an English major, so bear with me. The word website is something that we use, but not something that a prospective student or family uses to them. The Facebook page is a website with information about them. The YouTube channel is a website with videos about the institution.

00:06:28:20 - 00:06:59:23
Matt Hames
The Google Images Search is a website of images about the institution. So calling the website, the website and not calling the other ones websites that people look at is diminishing the power of those other platforms, in my opinion, and putting way too much weight on a daddy to you that let's face it, is often a committee built mass of top names left now as bottom nav and sometimes even right now.

00:07:00:07 - 00:07:05:11
Matt Hames
Yeah it's not this simple list of things to find information when you're a prospective student.

00:07:06:03 - 00:07:22:17
John Azoni
Yeah, it's not. I see a lot of websites that are just so cluttered and I feel that too, because, like, you know, I built my own website and it's hard. You, like, want to put everything in there and it's like you don't really have the data to know, like, how people are clicking around and stuff like that.

00:07:23:06 - 00:07:50:11
Matt Hames
What's really interesting too is that what is student life like? Switch from the dot edu to chronological social media platforms. So it first went to Facebook and Facebook was the chronological what is student life like? Then it went to Instagram, then it went to Tik-Tok and it disappeared from the dot edu. So it's hard for a dog Edu to answer what is student life like?

00:07:50:11 - 00:08:02:17
Matt Hames
Because that has switched to YouTube for instance, like YouTube can be the effective home for what is student life like because the dot edu has no longer that place.

00:08:03:02 - 00:08:23:06
John Azoni
Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to dive into that before we get in. You know, for listeners, I'm getting over a cold, so I'm just going to cough my way through this interview. And now you have the context for that. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about. Yeah, YouTube and enrollment marketing. How does three integrate YouTube into its strategy for getting prospects through that enrollment funnel?

00:08:23:21 - 00:08:49:12
Matt Hames
So it's a great question. We have two ways that we do it. We do create pre-roll paid YouTube advertising. So we do create 15 second and 32nd spots, if you will, for our partner institutions. And by the pre-roll. And so drive awareness, behavior. And then the second part is I come in and I try to teach them a bunch of different things about YouTube and how important it is.

00:08:49:19 - 00:09:17:14
Matt Hames
And what's always interesting to me about YouTube is that there might be like 700 Facebook pages at an institution, and I'm not making that number up Like they're genuinely might be 700 Facebook pages at an institution, but there are often only two YouTube channels. The main YouTube channel and the athletics YouTube channel. Yeah, so we'll just park athletics for a second when we talk about this because that's a whole nother podcast.

00:09:17:14 - 00:09:49:05
Matt Hames
But go to the to the main YouTube channel. So where I come in and as I say, this is the one place where you can talk to prospective students and families. It is the second most used search engine on the Internet and it is owned by the first most used search engine on the Internet. So giving them information about what is student life like, what is academics like, what our faculty like, like a bunch of different bigger picture kind of things is a smart way to tell the story about your institution.

00:09:49:05 - 00:09:59:16
Matt Hames
So I try to help institutions optimize YouTube as best as I possibly can, which obviously we're going to get into the nuts and bolts of that in this conversation.

00:10:00:05 - 00:10:19:20
John Azoni
Yeah, and that's an interesting something I ran into just last week was the power of just answering those questions like, what is this? Like what you know, tell me about, you know, just different sort of questions that people might be asking, answering those on YouTube, Because I, I work with University of Chicago and we're getting ready to do a new series of videos.

00:10:19:20 - 00:10:38:04
John Azoni
And I wanted to study up on one of their programs that we were going to be profiling. And I asked Jackie Beatty like, tell me about this program. What's it about? And it told me, and then it spit out a video that had like I did, you know, for them. What's also that was like we didn't talk about this specific program in this video.

00:10:38:04 - 00:10:55:17
John Azoni
But yeah, we talked about some of the adjacent things that they would have learned which applied to this program. So they gave me this whole thing about like soft skills, you know, interpersonal skills that you'd learn at University of Chicago, like leadership and data storytelling and stuff like that. I'm like, Oh, that's it. Did its job. Like, Yeah, yeah.

00:10:55:17 - 00:11:13:13
John Azoni
You know, So that's cool. So it really has me thinking more about, like the importance of what questions our students are asking as they're considering your school further and further. And how can you answer those beyond just saying, Here's all the reasons why we're great? You know, here's another video that says, Here's why we're great.

00:11:14:01 - 00:11:44:11
Matt Hames
Yeah, it's so another tool that you can actually use is you can Google your institution. So Google your institution by name. And the very first thing will be your daddy do. The next thing will be a Google snippet called People Also Ask, which is crowdsource information that people, probably prospective students and families are asking Google about your institution, like what is student life like at institution?

00:11:44:11 - 00:12:11:02
Matt Hames
Is institution a good school? And so answering those people also ask questions as a Google video is absolutely one of the most simple ways that you can be the one who answers to those questions. Because often and right now, John, is most of those answers are by U.S. News and World Report or Prep Scholar or those review sites that exist in the world that answer a lot of the questions.

00:12:11:08 - 00:12:26:16
Matt Hames
And the ideal situation is that you answer it with a senior person at your institution who's looking into the camera and saying the answer to people's questions. So yeah, that's one of the things that I suggest to all the time to our partners. Titian's Yeah.

00:12:27:05 - 00:12:39:07
John Azoni
YouTube shorts are kind of a newish thing within the last few years with the unknown ness of TikTok. What's the unique opportunity that YouTube Shorts presents for in terms of like reach and deliverability and all that stuff?

00:12:39:15 - 00:13:03:14
Matt Hames
Yeah, So YouTube's shorts and reels and I know we're not talking about meta platforms, but reels in YouTube shorts were born out of the ban of Tik Tok in India in 2020. So when the 200 million people who are using Tik Tok no longer could use Tik Tok in 2020, and those content creators no longer had Tik Tok as a platform, Neta introduced reels and YouTube introduced shorts.

00:13:03:14 - 00:13:30:10
Matt Hames
And I think the opportunity that continues to exist is that as the uncertainty of Tik Tok exists in the US, the algorithms are going to deliver shorts to more people at this particular moment. Understanding the reason behind the platform's tactical execution, I don't even know what to call it. Understanding the reason behind shorts can help you understand how that's going to get delivered more.

00:13:30:15 - 00:13:57:06
Matt Hames
So just the opportunity right now is that for sure, in this unknown marketplace of delivery of content, you can bet that Google and Alphabet are going to deliver shorts to people who are interested in an institution. And yes, Google is aware that you've sent emails and or have said to people, I am interested, they're aware of the Google searches that you're doing.

00:13:57:13 - 00:14:13:11
Matt Hames
They're aware that you've done a Google search for what is student life like at Monsters University. So if there's a Monsters University short about what student life like is like, they are more likely to deliver that on your Google home page and or in suggested videos.

00:14:14:00 - 00:14:36:14
John Azoni
Yeah, and I think that the use case for like what kinds of videos you should experiment with on shorts is probably going to differ from Instagram. Yes, Instagram reels because I think we think about them all the same. Like, okay, I should make some trending funny video on Instagram and then put it on YouTube shorts and then, you know, back in the day, put it on Tik tok, too.

00:14:36:19 - 00:14:58:17
John Azoni
And I feel like the reels in Tik Tok might have similar intended purposes that people go on there to consume, you know, entertainment or whatever. But for YouTube, I mean, if a student is on your YouTube page that's considering your school, it's likely that they don't really want to be entertained as much as they want to. I agree that they want to know something.

00:14:58:17 - 00:15:20:04
John Azoni
And the shorts as your I think is a such a great opportunity to answer those questions in a succinct way, because one of the things that I hate is when I have a question about something's not working right on some website or whatever, or, you know, my plumbing sprung a leak or whatever it is, and I go and like I have to sift through like a 20 minute video to find the answer.

00:15:20:04 - 00:15:28:04
John Azoni
And I always go to like, give me the one minute video that just tells me how to fix this problem. And so I think that that thinking is useful.

00:15:28:10 - 00:15:50:15
Matt Hames
I think you're exactly right. If you start to think about the questions that people might want or that might have like, is Monsters University a good school where you could have the provost or you can have somebody who's really good on camera stand up there with a vertical shot, right? Because it's going to be a short and give a short description as to why every institution has it admitted.

00:15:50:15 - 00:16:18:11
Matt Hames
Student Day Coming up, you could have students say, here's why you should attend, admitted Student Day as a short. Here's what you will get from it. Here's where to park. Here is like you can start to answer all the questions on YouTube shorts with simple to make videos that you can then post. Now, this is not to say that long form videos, the kind of videos that you do that talk about student life in a big way are not also things that you should be doing.

00:16:18:11 - 00:16:43:12
Matt Hames
But right now you can answer people's questions using YouTube shorts and you don't have to try to entertain. YouTube shorts should inform. It's the second most used search engine on the internet. It can be the place where you can inform people about what life is like once they're inside the world. Then the more long form videos about student life, about academics, about faculty research.

00:16:43:20 - 00:16:49:06
Matt Hames
Those videos can then be where when they start to dive in on the YouTube channel.

00:16:49:06 - 00:17:11:07
John Azoni
Yeah, absolutely. And when we work with clients, we're actually, you know, really diving into both like, here's the long form video. Yeah, but like, how can we design this shoot so that we can get these shorts out of it in like top of funnel topic? So like, we've been working a lot with Miami University in Ohio on this gorgeous campus.

00:17:11:14 - 00:17:29:14
John Azoni
Yeah, yeah, super great. And we're getting ready to do some faculty stories and one of the departments is Kinesiology. You're like exercise science, the science of movement, and one of their professors. You know, we were just talking through like, tell me about your research. Like, what are some things that you're interested in that you like to talk about?

00:17:29:14 - 00:17:42:19
John Azoni
And he just started telling me about, like, for instance, like the influence of exercise on your immune system. So like when you are going to go get a flu shot if you exercise pretty close to that, it's going to boost the effectiveness of that flu shot, which I thought was.

00:17:43:00 - 00:17:44:09
Matt Hames
Think that is awesome.

00:17:44:13 - 00:18:02:06
John Azoni
I thought that was fascinating. And I'm like, yes, let's make a short video just on that. You know, like while we've got you sitting here for an hour talking about why theology is it's a great program. Let's also just get you talking about like some of these interesting things that we can repurposing to short. So I really suggest that that's how every school should be approaching.

00:18:02:16 - 00:18:24:06
John Azoni
Any video shoot is thinking don't just think for the one video, but think for what are some interesting things that people might be Googling or people might stumble upon it that they might find interesting. So yeah, that's awesome. So let's talk about some best practices. So thumbnails is a big one. So our YouTube is our handle is higher at storytelling view on there.

00:18:24:06 - 00:18:37:22
John Azoni
You'll see a lot of me not practicing what I preach. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm slowly starting to move the needle on thumbnails and like playlists and things like that. So don't judge by what I've done.

00:18:37:22 - 00:18:39:10
Matt Hames
Well, no, definitely not.

00:18:40:00 - 00:18:51:13
John Azoni
Our listeners should judge by, you know, the theories that we talk about here. But yeah, so talk about thumbnails. What does schools do? I mean I have so many opinions on this, but in your opinion, what are schools do wrong with thumbnails?

00:18:52:01 - 00:19:15:19
Matt Hames
So yeah, a thumbnail to me is like the subject line of an email. So what schools do wrong is they leave the subject line blank. That's basically it. They don't do anything right. So if I was to go to a VP of enrollment and say, I really think that all the emails that you send out to students should have blank subject lines, They would look at me like I was an idiot.

00:19:15:19 - 00:19:36:01
Matt Hames
So if I turn to them and say, Well, then how come all of your YouTube videos have no thumbnails? How come there's no thumbnail inviting somebody to click on that video? And what I say to institutions and what I'll say to you and what I say to myself is that the click through rate on YouTube videos are really, really good.

00:19:36:01 - 00:19:56:21
Matt Hames
Click through rate is like 6%. I bet you Mr. Beast is getting somewhere in the 10% range. Me at three enrollment marketing, I'm getting one and a half percent click through rate and my goal in 2025 is to increase that to 2%. That is a metric you can look at in creator studio on YouTube. You can look at your click through rate.

00:19:57:05 - 00:20:36:14
Matt Hames
You can start putting some creative thought and content to your thumbnails. And then at the end of the year you can go to your boss and say, Hey, look, I increased it by 1% or half a percent or whatever, and that is going to lift all of your videos. If you increase your click through rate by half a percent or 1% this year, that will result in an X factor increase in all the views of your videos because your channel is getting clicks, the YouTube algorithm is going to increase the amount of people who see your video and suggested videos and thus, since they're getting clicks, they're going to carry on getting clicks and you're

00:20:36:14 - 00:20:47:04
Matt Hames
just going to increase. So. So yeah, YouTube thumbnails are one of the most important and underutilized ways of getting people to click on your videos.

00:20:47:14 - 00:21:09:18
John Azoni
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a mindset shift too, between people that just use YouTube as a dumping ground for like links or whatever. Because for a while with my YouTube page, that's what it was. I would just like I just wanted a place to upload these video podcast episodes and share them with my newsletter. And I wasn't really thinking for the YouTube community, it was more just like a dumping spot.

00:21:10:01 - 00:21:18:01
John Azoni
And I think that's what a lot of colleges probably do. And you can kind of tell by their thumbnails. Absolutely. And their lack of playlists.

00:21:18:06 - 00:21:18:13
Matt Hames
Yeah.

00:21:18:18 - 00:21:36:09
John Azoni
What their mindset is towards YouTube. Yeah. And so I really think it's like it starts with are you at a place, you know, in your marketing tactics or whatever where you're going to take YouTube seriously. And so it's fine if it's, you know, if it's not a priority, then all of this stuff that we're talking about doesn't really matter.

00:21:36:09 - 00:22:03:05
John Azoni
But, you know, when you're ready to take it seriously, like these are the things that a serious YouTube channel looks like, you know, intentional thumbnails, a different thumbnail for each video. One of the things that I see so much of is like, I think decisions made out of convenience. So like, let's have a speaker series, so we will call it something, we'll call it whatever, and they will label the thumbnail by the name of the speaker series, which tells you nothing about what that person is talking about.

00:22:03:10 - 00:22:13:17
John Azoni
Yeah, exactly. You know, And so then you go on their page and you just see this wall of the same thumbnail and you have to burn so many calories to figure out, is there even anything interesting in here?

00:22:14:04 - 00:22:43:19
Matt Hames
You've already left. You've already left, like you're just not even there anymore. So yeah, yeah. I want to give you four tips for every single video that you upload to YouTube. So for tips, here they are in order and we can dive into these a little bit more if you want to. But in order, the number one tip is call your video what it is dot MLV or MP four So if your video is what is student life like at Monster Z University, make the video file name.

00:22:43:23 - 00:22:52:12
Matt Hames
What is student life like at Monsters University dot movie or MP for whatever it is? So that's the first tip call it. What it is is make the.

00:22:52:12 - 00:22:54:04
John Azoni
File name or should file.

00:22:54:04 - 00:22:54:09
Matt Hames
Name.

00:22:54:14 - 00:22:56:16
John Azoni
Dot MP four in the YouTube title.

00:22:56:21 - 00:23:21:10
Matt Hames
No, this is the file name. Okay. This is the actual file name. So now when you upload it, think about the title of the video, because the title of the video is the most important and the name of your institution is the most important. So Monsters University Student Life explained or some sort of. So you want to get Monsters University up the left hand side of the title as much as you possibly can.

00:23:21:14 - 00:23:42:09
Matt Hames
I'll live with what is student life like at Monsters University? It's still going to work. The best scenario is figuring out how to get the name of your institution as far left and the video title as you possibly can. So that's tip number two. Tip number three, go into YouTube Creative Studio and make a default video uploads text.

00:23:42:17 - 00:24:04:12
Matt Hames
So the default video uploads text is here is what is missions is like. Here's what student life is like. Here's what this is like. Here's what this is like. And with links to all of those things and the default uploads. So when you upload a new video to YouTube automatically all of that content is there. You can delete it if you want to.

00:24:04:16 - 00:24:29:16
Matt Hames
You can paragraph down it and say, This video is about Matt Hames who is an English major in Hamilton and he's explaining why he chose Monsters University. And underneath it is a bunch of information about the institution so that is just default content and you can find that in the default uploads of creative studio. So that's tip number three and tip number four is put everything in playlists.

00:24:29:22 - 00:24:49:01
Matt Hames
Your video should be in six or seven different playlists because playlists is a way that Google sorts out what the next suggested video should be. So put them all in playlists, as many playlists as you possibly can. I know we're going to talk about playlists in a bit, so put them in playlists and then we already talked about the importance of thumbnails.

00:24:49:07 - 00:25:09:12
Matt Hames
Thumbnails are the way when you've put your video in the best situation to get delivered to somebody. So now all of these four tips are helpful in getting a video delivered to somebody. The thumbnail is what gets them to click on it. So you do all those four things to get the video delivered and then you do the thumbnail to get it clicked on.

00:25:09:19 - 00:25:10:20
John Azoni
Yeah, absolutely.

00:25:10:20 - 00:25:12:05
Matt Hames
So, all right, it's simple.

00:25:12:14 - 00:25:27:18
John Azoni
That is great. I think having a few things like that, like you should do this for every video because when you get under the hood of uploading YouTube video, it can be overwhelming because like a lot of Do you want it to say this is for kids? If it's not for kids, is it, you know, like all these possible things that you can input?

00:25:27:23 - 00:25:45:03
John Azoni
And I know as you know, business owner, I'm busy. Like I drag my feet with that stuff. I'm like, I did all the work to make the video. That's what I care about. And now it's like much. Well, I got to think of, like tags and stuff like that. And like, it's just it's always a temptation for it to be an afterthought.

00:25:45:03 - 00:25:56:14
Matt Hames
You know what it's like the way I think about it all the time is you do all the work to plan a great wedding. So you do all this work to plan a great wedding, right? And you spend a lot of time and then you don't send invites.

00:25:57:10 - 00:25:57:18
John Azoni
Yeah.

00:25:58:03 - 00:26:14:16
Matt Hames
It's like you planned a great wedding. You did all this work to plan a great wedding, and then you didn't send invites. So, like, if you don't send invites, if you don't do this work to invite people to watch your videos, then all the work you did to create that video is just going to be wasted.

00:26:14:22 - 00:26:21:02
John Azoni
Yeah, for sure. I always have to remind myself that like, Hey, don't stop now. Like this is done.

00:26:21:06 - 00:26:42:12
Matt Hames
All of the great work, great. You've done all this awesome work and you've made an amazing video. Now you have to invite people to watch it because they're not just going to watch it unless you do the right things to get them to invite people. So the four tips are how to get your invitations delivered. The fifth thing we talked about thumbnails is how to get people to open it and watch your video.

00:26:42:19 - 00:27:12:03
John Azoni
Yeah. On the topic of playlists, I came across a few YouTube channels, so I'm namedrop University of Hartford, SUNY Polytechnic Institute and then University of Richmond. All three of them have done playlists, right? So those are great schools to look at. And then just notice how your brain feels when you land on that channel. Putting yourself in the perspective of the earth in the shoes of the prospective student, how easy it is to navigate their questions and what they might want to know.

00:27:12:11 - 00:27:31:22
John Azoni
You know, if they can just like, okay, I've got a playlist here that's academic life. I can watch all of these videos. Great. But when it's like just a wall of scattered videos, think about how overwhelming that would be. Like, like, imagine going to Netflix and there's no organization. You're just here's a bunch of possible things that you could watch.

00:27:33:01 - 00:27:49:19
John Azoni
Here's kids shows and also here's like, murder mysteries And like, you know, they're next to each other. You know, it's like it doesn't make any sense. So, yeah, that was one of the things in the last week when I discovered these these channels, I was like, Oh my gosh, Like, my brain just feels like it just kind of.

00:27:49:22 - 00:28:14:18
Matt Hames
Stops, right? You know? So the institutions that you talked about, they've thought about a couple of things because you can make a view for people who have not subscribed. And then if you for people who have subscribed so you can change that landing page view for non-subscribers and subscribers in the institutions you talked about have really thought deeply about how to present information to people who have not subscribed yet.

00:28:15:00 - 00:28:35:00
Matt Hames
And that is really a very simple thing that not a lot of institutions do well. So, yeah, I looked at the ones that you talked about and they're just so easy on your brain and you think about the brains and we talk about this all the time. The brains of prospective students and families are like, I have so many options, right?

00:28:35:00 - 00:28:53:15
Matt Hames
Like, I have so many questions. I don't even know what the questions are. I'm under so much stress. Everyone keeps asking me where I'm going to go to school. Where have you applied to school? There's so much stress. And if you think about your YouTube landing page for the non-subscribers, you can make it much less stressful and much easier to navigate.

00:28:53:15 - 00:28:59:08
Matt Hames
And that is just going to boost your viewership. So all these things are just tips on boosting your viewership.

00:28:59:13 - 00:29:18:04
John Azoni
And the more friction you put in in the way of someone that isn't fully sold on your school yet, you're just shooting yourself in the foot because it's like I downloaded something that someone recommended to me the other day that was like kind of like a LinkedIn tool or whatever. And it took me a while to kind of like navigate like how to get it set up and link to my YouTube account.

00:29:18:04 - 00:29:36:12
John Azoni
And I ran into some tech issues and I'm like, on top of the fact that this is expensive, I'm like, I'm out of here. Like, Yeah, yeah. It's like even just like, run into like one tripping wire of like, oh, it's not working correctly. Do I really care about this enough to like, contact tech support and, like, really go out of my way to try this out?

00:29:36:16 - 00:29:44:16
John Azoni
You know, I feel like that's like with schools, it's like you land on a YouTube page and it's like, Oh, I got a thing so hard about like finding a video that I want. I'm out of here.

00:29:44:22 - 00:30:02:22
Matt Hames
And you're right. And there's just not enough thought put into even getting a YouTube video in front of people like we're not even at the stage where institutions are thinking about how to optimize YouTube to get videos in front of people so they're not even given the option to get out of here yet. They're not even getting here first.

00:30:03:16 - 00:30:34:06
Matt Hames
So, you know, like you look at a YouTube channel and most of them have like 500 subscribers and about a thousand views, max. Right. Like, you know, you don't often find institutions of higher education that have big amounts of subscriber hours and or big amounts of views of their videos. It's just, you know, 500 to 1000 views. And then another video that was uploaded yesterday that has 100 views or something like that or their feature video if they care about it.

00:30:34:10 - 00:30:55:17
Matt Hames
This is how you'll fit in at our great institution has maybe like maybe 10,000 views for a bigger institution, but mostly not right. So they're just not putting enough thought, in my opinion, to the second most used search engine and the number one download it up by 13 to 17 year olds. Yeah. Which is where are the people?

00:30:55:22 - 00:31:02:14
Matt Hames
They're here. They're here. Why are you chasing this next thing when they're all here and you're not doing anything on this platform?

00:31:02:19 - 00:31:09:17
John Azoni
Yeah, exactly. Is there a school that you can point out like that has impressive follower numbers that you know is doing it right?

00:31:09:22 - 00:31:31:21
Matt Hames
Yeah. So, I mean, if you look at the Ivies, they just get subscribers because they are that well branded schools, right? So your top branded schools are doing some things on YouTube that are worth looking at because they have an investment. But I ran across this school once, the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and their subscriber numbers are Ivy League like subscriber numbers.

00:31:31:21 - 00:31:50:22
Matt Hames
Like as part of my role at three, I look at a lot of YouTube channels and most of them have like maxed thousand subscribers. I talked to one institution that said that their goal each year was to increase their subscriber number by a thousand. And I said, okay, well how are you going to accomplish that? And they said, Well, we don't know that we'd love your house.

00:31:51:02 - 00:32:15:00
Matt Hames
And so when I saw the University of Minnesota Duluth subscriber numbers, I called them and I said, Guys, this is amazing. You have incredible numbers. Like what did you do? And they said, We tell everybody who comes to an information session to subscribe to our YouTube channel that's like, Wait, what? Back to the wedding thing, right? We invite people to do the thing we want them to do, and lo and behold, people are doing the thing we want them to do.

00:32:15:04 - 00:32:45:03
Matt Hames
I mean, marketing is simple. Like if you ask people to do something, they're more likely to do it. If you do not ask people to do something they don't know, you want them to do it. So like we have all of this traffic that comes to our institutions, we have all this communication with students. What the University of Minnesota, Duluth did is they just said, let's tell people to Skype to our YouTube channel, because again, like you said, John, we're putting all this effort and time and treasure into making these videos about what life is like.

00:32:45:12 - 00:33:08:05
Matt Hames
Wouldn't it be great if people saw them? Yeah. So they just said, let's tell people to go look at the videos. It's bafflingly and absurdly that simple. It's simply telling people to subscribe to our YouTube channel. It's telling people who just graduated to go and subscribe to the YouTube channel so that more people will see how great this institution is.

00:33:08:10 - 00:33:47:20
Matt Hames
And by the way, if they subscribe while watching a video that is incredible juice in the algorithm for that video. So if you can convince, like your one, two, five year out alums to subscribe to a video about student life while watching the video, then that supercharges that video to be sent to more people. And if somehow if you've got a thumbnail that says why you should watch the video, then you're going to get more clicks on that video and now all of a sudden, all the work that you do, John, for institutions and making these great videos can be, you know, it's not gaming, it's slightly gaming, but it's the purely gaming, right?

00:33:47:20 - 00:34:12:06
Matt Hames
You're just feeding into what the algorithm is looking for, which is interest. And so if you can tell an algorithm that again, has the file name correctly as well, title has a description about the video, has chapters, if you can add chapters to it, awesome. And then you ask alums to subscribe to it while watching. And that will really, really help us help us game the system.

00:34:12:11 - 00:34:16:05
Matt Hames
Then what you're doing is you're gaming the system.

00:34:16:05 - 00:34:32:17
John Azoni
Love it, love it. Well, this has been great. I've loved having you on here and learning all this stuff for me. You know, even as a videographer, you know, we focus so much on making the videos. And then, you know, a lot of times we're studying marketing kind of on the site. Absolutely. These algorithms are always changing and stuff like that.

00:34:32:17 - 00:34:38:13
John Azoni
So I love having people like you on there. Like one of your main things is like studying the algorithm.

00:34:38:13 - 00:35:04:00
Matt Hames
So I constantly like to say you guys are wedding planners and you plan incredible weddings and nobody invites people to see your wedding. So like, institutions need to really fully understand that making a great video step one of many, many steps. So hopefully they've come out of this with some tips on how to turn the great investment and the great videos.

00:35:04:00 - 00:35:22:11
Matt Hames
I see it's so many really awesome videos that institutions are making. And I just look at the title and I look at the description and I know the file name is not right because nobody makes file names, right? And I look at the thumbnail and I just think of this wasted potential all of this time and effort to make this brilliant video.

00:35:22:15 - 00:35:33:14
Matt Hames
That's not it, not done yet. And they got done with making the great video, which makes me sad because like the stories out there are awesome and I just wish more people saw them.

00:35:33:14 - 00:35:36:16
John Azoni
Love it. That's a great line to end on. Where can people find out.

00:35:36:20 - 00:35:57:08
Matt Hames
Where you can find me personally on LinkedIn and you can find more information about what we do at three Enrollment marketing at three enrollment dot com. We also have the Institute of Higher Education is happening in June in Beaver Creek, Colorado, and we're going to talk about so much of this. I'm going to be there. You can pick my brain at Beaver Creek.

00:35:57:11 - 00:36:36:01
Matt Hames
It's a great opportunity to understand enrollment as a whole. So we just care so much about enrollment. And everybody who goes to the Institute for Higher Education gets a mentor. And I am happy to mentor people on how to optimize their YouTube as well. And again, as the VP of enrollment for an enrollment professional, you don't go in and vacuum and clean the walls of your welcome center, but you do ask people to vacuum and clean the walls so I can give you the language that people want to do on how to vacuum and clean the walls of your YouTube channel because it's completely messy and should be fixed.

00:36:36:07 - 00:36:39:17
John Azoni
Perfect. All right, man. Well, thanks so much for coming on. It's been great having you.

00:36:39:23 - 00:36:47:00
Matt Hames
Yeah, it's been such a great conversation and I appreciate you having me on. And let's stay in touch and keep chatting about this. All right.

00:36:47:04 - 00:36:47:19
John Azoni
Sounds good.