#106 - CRUSH Yield Season With a Simple Google Doc

Written By John Azoni

With John Azoni, Podcast Host

 

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SHOW NOTES

In this solo episode, John addresses a critical gap in how colleges use video content during yield season. Most institutions have great video content scattered across platforms, but admissions counselors often don't have easy access to share it in one-on-one conversations with prospective students—exactly when it could make the biggest impact.

Key takeaways:

  • Video shouldn't just be a broadcast tool measured by views—it's a powerful one-to-one communication asset

  • Five strategic views from an admissions counselor to fence-sitting students may be more valuable than 5,000 algorithm-driven views

  • Marketing, social media, and admissions teams often operate in silos, missing opportunities to leverage existing content

  • A simple Google Doc library organized by student questions can bridge this gap in an afternoon

  • Don't just rely on the algorithm to deliver your content—be the algorithm by hand-delivering the right video at the right moment

  • Measure success not just through broadcast metrics, but through counselor feedback on whether videos helped close enrollment gaps

Resources mentioned:

Connect with John:

  • (Done with AI so only about 95% accurate)

    00;00;00;09 - 00;00;18;02

    John Azoni

    Well, hey, folks, today I want to talk about something that's been coming up a lot lately in the strategy work that we've been doing with colleges and universities. And it feels, especially urgent right now because, you know, if you're listening to this in real time, we're in the middle of March, which is right in the middle of yield season.

    00;00;18;02 - 00;00;44;01

    John Azoni

    And so students have been admitted. They're deciding. And right now today, students are leaking out of your enrollment funnel, not because your school is in a great fit or because you don't have great content, but because the right content just isn't getting to the right student at the right moment. And I think there's a fix that most schools could implement honestly, in a single afternoon without a whole lot of hoopla and budget approvals and all that stuff.

    00;00;44;01 - 00;01;04;10

    John Azoni

    So let's just get right into it. Here's what I see over and over again when we do video strategy work with institutions. You've got a social media team or a social media person who is out there. You know, they're doing great work. They're following the trends. You know, they're making reels, they're doing dorm tours, they're capturing the culture on campus.

    00;01;04;19 - 00;01;27;20

    John Azoni

    Maybe you've got, you know, a set of student interns doing that or student ambassadors, whatever the case. But good stuff, really authentic stuff, the kind of stuff that really resonates with prospective students. Then you've got your broader marketing team managing, maybe the YouTube channel producing. The longer form videos, embedding content into email campaigns, handling the website, also doing great stuff.

    00;01;28;08 - 00;01;50;03

    John Azoni

    And then you've got admissions, you know, the counselors, the high school reps, the student ambassadors, and they're doing all the campus tours. And then these are the people on the front lines and they're having these one on one conversations with prospective students every single day. But here's the problem. Those three groups are often operating in complete silos. The social media team doesn't necessarily know what the marketing team is doing.

    00;01;50;03 - 00;02;15;06

    John Azoni

    The marketing team really isn't cross-pollinating with the social media team content and sharing content back and forth. Mark I may not have a clear window into what admissions counselors are actually hearing from students and the admissions team, the people that are doing the most direct, personal, influential communication with prospective students. They often don't have easy access to the video content that could help them do their jobs better.

    00;02;15;07 - 00;02;34;27

    John Azoni

    So think about that. You've got people on the front lines having these high stakes conversations with students who are on the fence, and they may not even know that a perfect video exists that speaks directly to the question that the student just asked. That's a leak, but it's a fixable one. And to get specific about the stakes here.

    00;02;35;10 - 00;03;00;03

    John Azoni

    Yield season is not the time for this, like, vague strategy talk, right? When a student doesn't enroll, it might not be because they made some big dramatic decision to go somewhere else. It could be very simple. It could be a very small thing that made a big impact. They start to feel uncertain or they have questions that aren't getting answered quickly enough or thoroughly enough, or in a format that actually resonates with them.

    00;03;00;15 - 00;03;25;21

    John Azoni

    And then another school comes along and does a slightly better job of making them feel seen and informed and excited. And that's where they go. And that was precisely my experience when I was looking at colleges as a high school senior. The year was 2002. I was looking at art schools. I was between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

    00;03;26;03 - 00;03;48;13

    John Azoni

    I visited Chicago first. Totally thought that was a done deal. That's where I wanted to go. I wanted to be in that, you know, big city environment. Chipotle was just coming out at the time when I did a campus visit. I had Chipotle for the first time in my life and I was a changed man. I mean, oh, my God, I never tasted a fast food style burrito like that before it.

    00;03;48;18 - 00;04;12;12

    John Azoni

    It changed my life so much so that I emailed Chipotle headquarters and said, Please come to Detroit. And they said, Sales, we're in the process of opening some locations in Detroit. Great. Anyway, but the point is, I thought Chicago was it for me, but then my dad was like, Hey, let's just go check out this school in Baltimore or else just to see if anything, it'll be a fun, you know, trip that we can take.

    00;04;13;01 - 00;04;33;24

    John Azoni

    And then simultaneously, I was in contact with a rep that had come to my high school from Micah, Maryland Institute College of Art, who I felt took a great interest in me. And really, I was really impressed by that. They just felt like she knew me and was following my work and really wanted me to go there and she really made me feel seen.

    00;04;34;07 - 00;04;59;14

    John Azoni

    So they had that in their corner. But we visited Maryland. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. The campus vibe was great. I was sold. I didn't expect to be sold, but I was totally sold. The weather had a lot to do with it. I decided to go to Micah, but I think back on that time about how impressionable I was, it just took one or two levers that Micah pulled to get me to completely change course.

    00;05;00;04 - 00;05;31;21

    John Azoni

    And in that impressionable time, stories could make all the difference. In our video saturated culture. We didn't have online videos back then. 2000 to the high school rep that really engaged with me. I ended up asking her, you know, a bunch of questions. Her responses really helped me out in the process. So imagine if that experience was amplified even more with video content that I could go down a rabbit hole watching in, you know, put the icing on the cake of how she was nurturing that relationship with me.

    00;05;32;02 - 00;05;53;15

    John Azoni

    So in the posted process, there's a lot of focus on email sequences, you know, automations, financial aid packages, campus visits, all that stuff, all of that matters. I mean, the campus visit was a big deal for me for so that was a big deciding factor. But video is this massively underutilized asset in that process, especially in 1 to 1 communication.

    00;05;53;15 - 00;06;09;25

    John Azoni

    And I want to spend the rest of this episode explaining exactly what I mean by this. And I want to give you a resource that I put together that I think can quickly and effectively bridge this gap to make sure people in those 1 to 1 scenarios with students have all the video content they need to do their jobs even better.

    00;06;10;13 - 00;06;43;05

    John Azoni

    So most of the time when a marketing team thinks about video performance, they're thinking about broadcast metrics. How many views did a video get on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook? How many likes, how many, you know, comments, all that stuff. And those metrics matter. And I'm not dismissing them at all because they are good, you know, top of funnel metrics to be tracking and you should absolutely be optimizing for the algorithm, give the algorithm everything it needs to understand, you know, who this content is for and get it in front of the right people and get it in front of the right audience.

    00;06;43;05 - 00;07;06;25

    John Azoni

    Yes, all of that do that. But what I want to challenge you on is broadcast metrics only tell part of the story, and sometimes they actually obscure a really important part of the conversation. What if a video only got five views? We would look at that and go, This video was a flop. You know, if we saw that on Instagram or something like that, most people would say total flop.

    00;07;07;13 - 00;07;30;27

    John Azoni

    Nobody liked it. But what if those five views were because in admissions, Councilor Hand delivered that link to five students who were on the fence about affordability or something like that. And it helped shift the conversation for three out of five of them. Are those five views a failure or are they some of the most valuable five views that video will ever get?

    00;07;30;27 - 00;07;51;08

    John Azoni

    And so that's the shift we need to make. We need to think about video not just as a broadcasting tool, but as a 1 to 1 communication tool that can really amplify the 1 to 1 efforts that we're having and really amplify that experience of nurturing that student. And when you start thinking about it that way, your whole approach to how to organize and share and measure your content has to evolve.

    00;07;51;23 - 00;08;13;03

    John Azoni

    You have to stop being the broadcaster. You have to also be the algorithm. You have to hand deliver the right content to the right person at the right moment. So what does that look like in practice? Here is the minimum viable product, the MVP that I'm suggesting you take and run with. And it's just a Google doc, seriously.

    00;08;13;16 - 00;08;44;00

    John Azoni

    And I know that feels underwhelming and like under prestigious or an institutional or something. And there's bigger digital asset management systems out there like binder, photo shelter, all of those are great. And if you can get institutional buy in and budget for a proper dam system, absolutely do that. That's the best case scenario. But those require these enterprise level investments and implementation, and that's not happening this week during yield season.

    00;08;44;11 - 00;09;15;07

    John Azoni

    What can happen this week, though, is a simple organized content library that your admissions counselors, your high school reps and student ambassadors can access and use. So here's the concept. You just go through all of your video content. So look at YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, wherever you have videos, whatever platforms, and you map it, you flag every video that can be useful to a prospective student who is asking a specific question during the enrollment process, and you organize it by the question it answers.

    00;09;15;09 - 00;09;37;00

    John Azoni

    And that's it. Pretty simple. So let me give you some concrete examples of how admissions counselor might actually use something like this. So a student reaches out and says they're worried about affordability. Like instead of sending a boilerplate email about financial aid resources, the counselor can pull up this content library, this little Google Docs cheat sheet, and send a personal note.

    00;09;37;00 - 00;09;59;01

    John Azoni

    Hey, I wanted to share this. You know, the student had the same concerns you're describing, and I think hearing her perspective might be helpful. Here's her story. Boom. That's a warm, human specific response powered by content that already exists. Or a high school rep is at a college where they're talking to a senior who's undecided about their major.

    00;09;59;01 - 00;10;22;13

    John Azoni

    They pull up a story about a student who came in completely undecided and found their direction through the school's advising program. You know, and they say, Hey, let me text you this real quick. What's your number? That's not a brochure. That's a person's story delivered at the exact right moment when it's relevant to that person. You're not hoping the algorithm is going to find that person at the right moment asking that question.

    00;10;22;25 - 00;10;50;12

    John Azoni

    You've got to be the algorithm. Another example would be like student ambassadors wrapping up a campus tour and someone asks, Hey, what is the dorm life actually like? Instead of just answering verbally, they can say, Hey, actually let me We have a couple of dorm room tours on Instagram that are pretty fun. So let me send you those you can kind of see more intimately than we were able to go through in today's tour what the dorm experience is like, what they look like on the inside, how people are structuring their beds and whatever else.

    00;10;50;29 - 00;11;08;11

    John Azoni

    And they have those links because someone built a library. And this is what I mean by hand delivering the right content and the right moment. It's not complicated. It just requires somebody to take a few hours and build the map. So let me walk you through how to actually structure this document, because I think the format really matters.

    00;11;08;11 - 00;11;34;12

    John Azoni

    I personally prefer to build this in a Google doc rather than a spreadsheet. I personally find spreadsheets to be very wonky when you have a lot of text and a lot of, you know, more than just some simple numbers or whatever in each cell. So a Google doc with tables organized by category just, I mean personally tends to be easier to navigate and share and add to each section of the document corresponds to a category of student concern.

    00;11;34;12 - 00;11;53;21

    John Azoni

    And with each section you've got a simple table with a few columns. So column on you'd have the students questions. So not a vague topic, but a specific question Is this school too expensive for my family or will I make friends if I'm shy? Or can I actually play if I join a sports team? Or will I just sit on the bench?

    00;11;53;21 - 00;12;15;12

    John Azoni

    I mean, they might not be explicitly verbally asking those questions, but a human will be able to say, Hey, this is what they're concerned about right now, and go to that row in the document. Column two is the video asset. So the title and a brief description of what the video covers. Column three would be the shareable link that YouTube link, Instagram link wherever the video lives.

    00;12;15;12 - 00;12;35;17

    John Azoni

    This is what you send to students. And then column four is the original file link. This is important. Don't look like this. So a dropbox Google drive or if you're using box or some sort of institutional file sharing thing, link to the actual video file. This part might take a little bit of legwork to track down the original file from whoever made it.

    00;12;35;17 - 00;12;59;06

    John Azoni

    Whoever has it on their phone or something like that from the social team or on some random hard drive, you know, from the video team or whatever. But do that work because if an admissions counselor is, say, presenting in person, you don't want to be relying on a YouTube link in a like a spotty Wi-Fi connection or if some, you know, that could possibly interfere with that engagement.

    00;12;59;15 - 00;13;21;07

    John Azoni

    If someone's managing, say, you know, a lobby display or setting up a screen at a college fair, like a monitor or something like that, they're going to need the original file. So make it easy for them to use this content in a way that it's best used. If someone wants to take a video and post it to their personal LinkedIn, for instance, they're going to get way better luck in the algorithm.

    00;13;21;07 - 00;13;47;03

    John Azoni

    Not posting a link to YouTube, but uploading the original video file to their post. So that's a big mistake. I mean, I see so many people on LinkedIn just posting YouTube links and the algorithm will just tank that. They'll just they'll hide it because they don't want to send people to YouTube. So upload the original file to LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever it is, and then call them five could be a suggested copy.

    00;13;47;03 - 00;14;10;01

    John Azoni

    So a few sentences, admissions counselors or student ambassadors or whatever could use to introduce the video in an email or a text. Don't make people figure out how to position the content. Give them a starting point that removes friction and increases the chances that they'll actually use it. So a lot of this process is just like, how do we remove friction from sharing this content?

    00;14;10;10 - 00;14;31;25

    John Azoni

    And then you just repeat that structure for each category. So here's a rough category list to get you started. For example, tuition, financial aid and value for cost conscious families. Another one would be student outcomes and career readiness for students thinking about what comes after college, another one campus culture and student experience. So what's the vibe like? What's the social life like?

    00;14;32;10 - 00;14;56;28

    John Azoni

    What do weekends actually look like? Another category academic programs, mentorship and support. So for students who are anxious about rigor or fits, another one, extracurriculars and campus involvement. So for students maybe wondering if they'll find their people, you know, those aren't the only categories. You know, your students, you know, what questions come up in every single counselor conversation.

    00;14;56;28 - 00;15;16;11

    John Azoni

    So let those questions drive the categories. I built a boilerplate Google doc template that you can access for free and you can get it at unveiled DOT TV's slash strategy toolbox. So I hope that you check it out. Go there, take it. Copy, paste it into a editable document on your end so that you can make it your own.

    00;15;16;26 - 00;15;39;21

    John Azoni

    Now, I want to come back to the measurement question because I think it's actually one of the most important changes that we can make in our thinking. So right now, so many institutions are measuring video performance entirely through these broadcast metrics, like I said. But if that's the only lens you're using, you're missing a whole dimension of how video actually drives enrollment.

    00;15;39;26 - 00;16;06;23

    John Azoni

    So here's what I challenge you to add to your measurement mix. Talk to your admissions counselors. Ask them when you share video one on one with student, what happens? Did they watch it? Did it help answer the question? Did it come up again in a follow up conversation? This doesn't require any sort of sophisticated backend analytics platform. It can be as simple as a counselor are following up with a student and asking, hey, do you get a chance to watch that video I sent?

    00;16;07;04 - 00;16;26;24

    John Azoni

    Did it help? Yes or no? That's a data point. That's a trackable result. And you can also track, you know, click through rates. If you're including video links in your email nurture sequences, you can look at watch rates. How much of the video did they actually watch before dropping off? These are signals that tell you whether the content is connecting.

    00;16;26;24 - 00;16;53;08

    John Azoni

    But the bigger point is if your measurement system only includes the people who happen to find your content through an algorithm and it excludes the students who received it directly from a counselor or an ambassador at exactly the right moment, you're undervaluing your video content so much significantly, the most important views your video might ever get might never show up in your YouTube analytics dashboard.

    00;16;53;29 - 00;17;21;17

    John Azoni

    So let's talk about implementation. What does this take honestly to implement? I think it's like a few hours, some internal conversation and someone just willing to own it. I genuinely think that you could have a working version of this library up and running in 3 to 4 hours, pull up your YouTube channel, go through your Instagram feed, flag the content that could serve prospective students asking real questions and start dropping it into the document.

    00;17;21;29 - 00;17;42;27

    John Azoni

    And to save time on tracking down those video files you can download, There's like if you Google like Instagram, real downloader or something like that, or tic tac downloader, there's tools out there that you can just paste a link in there, watch a quick ad, and then it will give you the full rez download link that you can download.

    00;17;42;27 - 00;18;08;13

    John Azoni

    And then you have the file. There's a tool called Click Grab, which you can plug in a YouTube link. And unless they have it blocked through some sort of setting on the back end, it will download that video file. And so you can use that for any sort of internal videos that you want to download from YouTube channel without having to go track the original file down and slow this whole process down.

    00;18;08;29 - 00;18;29;27

    John Azoni

    The other thing I'd strongly encourage you to do is loop in your admissions counselors early, so not after you've built the whole thing, but before. Ask them the questions that they're getting the most. Ask them where they feel they're coming up short in terms of resources. They're the ones on the front lines. They know exactly what students are wrestling with.

    00;18;29;27 - 00;19;00;10

    John Azoni

    Their input should really drive what goes in the library and then share it. Admissions counselors, high school reps, student ambassadors, doing tours, everyone who is having direct conversations with prospective students should have the link to this Google document, this cheat sheet, as I call it, and then communicate. Markham in admissions need to actually talk to each other. The social team needs to know what they're creating that's being used downstream and how effective it is, because if it's helpful, they should be doubling down on that stuff and making more of it.

    00;19;00;27 - 00;19;26;12

    John Azoni

    There's probably great Instagram videos sitting in your feed right now that an admissions counselor has never seen. That would be perfect for a student asking about campus culture or something, for instance. So just bridge that gap. So that's the idea. It's not glamorous. You can start with a Google doc, you can make it fancy later. It's not some fancy, flashy new piece of technology that has to go through purchasing and all this stuff.

    00;19;26;12 - 00;19;50;21

    John Azoni

    It's just a better way of organizing and sharing what you already have. You put time and money and creative energy into making this video content. So the goal of this exercise is to make sure that the contents actually working for you. And it's not just at the mercy of the algorithm because the algorithm is not your friend. The algorithm's purpose is to make more money for the company that built the model.

    00;19;51;04 - 00;20;16;26

    John Azoni

    It's not to make you money. So be the algorithm. Be in real human conversations with students and get your video content to them when they need it most. So again, you can get this template for free at unveiled. That TV slash strategy toolbox unveiled is spelled unveiled. It's a simple boilerplate Google Docs structured the way I described it with, you know, categories and tables, all of that.

    00;20;16;26 - 00;20;35;12

    John Azoni

    Just copy and paste it into an editable document on your end and make it your own and share it with the right people. Just start there. So if you found this episode useful, share it with a colleague in admissions or markup. This is exactly the kind of conversation that needs to be happening across those teams, not just within them.

    00;20;35;24 - 00;20;48;14

    John Azoni

    If you take me up on this suggestion, I'd love to hear about it and I'd love to see your version of the document. So email me at John at Unveiled Dot TV and let me see what you come up with. All right, Thanks.





John Azoni
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