Boost College Applications By Reducing Friction In Your Youtube Titles

Imagine telling someone “If you complete one pushup, we will each win $100” and before they go to do the pushup you attach a 50 lb weighted vest on them. The weight was not part of the rules. Why did you add the weight? I don’t know. That’s what I’m sayin.

Unnecessary friction is bad.

Friction is not what you want when you’re trying to get someone to do something that benefits you.

Your content works the same way. You don’t want to make people try harder than they need to in order to do what you want them to do.

The ultimate goal of much of our college’s marketing content is to drive applications and enrollment. Your videos can be a major source of leverage toward those goals if handled correctly.

But my guess is a lot of colleges have a bunch of 50 lb weights attached to their videos and they don’t even know it.

So I want to share one actionable thing you can do this week to remove that friction.

Remove the mystery from your titles.

My kids (gen alpha) and all their friends love blind boxes. Labubus are sold in blind boxes. When you buy one, you don't know which one you're getting. The dopamine hit of anticipation is a strong motivator.

That works with toys. It doesn't work with marketing content.

Recently I came across 2 colleges making the same "blind box" mistake on Youtube.

One, for instance, had a video titled "Meet Sarah Brenarde, '26" (name changed)

Putting myself in the shoes of a prospective student, here's what goes through my head.

-Who is Sarah?
-Why would I want to meet a random student?
-Does she represent a program I'm interested in?
-Does she have a particular point of view that would align with my values?

All of those unanswered questions equal friction. Friction reduces clicks.

Instead, your titles need to be "slippery." It should be easy for a stranger to land on your channel, be presented with a video, and know what they'd be getting if they clicked.

If that school simply added Sarah's program name to the title, it would at least answer one of those questions for me and reduce friction.

"Meet Sarah Brenarde, '26 - Environmental Science"

Okay, so now if environmental science is relevant to me, I stand a better chance of clicking. This is still a pretty vague title though.

To take that a few steps further, try keeping these simple questions in your back pocket when writing titles...

1. Who is this person?
2. What program do they represent?
3. What is their point of view?

Now the title becomes this:

"How an Environmental Science Student Found Her Calling in Climate Policy | Sarah Brenarde ’26"

Much clearer. Gives me a reason to care or not care.

Your team has done all this work to make a video. Don’t let confusion be a weighted vest for people. Make it easy for them to know what they’re going to get if they click and you’ll be in better shape.