7 Super Hacks for Your YouTube Thumbnails: (And No, You Don’t Need to Copy Mr Beast’s Style)
I have created over 100 YouTube thumbnails for clients across various industries and niches. Through my experience, I have noticed that even small changes can make a significant difference in click-through rates, with some changes resulting in up to a nine-fold increase in views. I want to share seven powerful tips that can help you increase your CTR, grab attention, and ultimately increase your video views. The best part is, that you don’t need to create thumbnails like Mr. Beast to achieve these results.
Table of Contents
- How to increase your CTR on Youtube?
- 7 Effective Strategies for Creating YouTube Thumbnails
- 1. Use recognizable objects.
- 2 — Augmented reality, distorted reality, or aberrant perspective
- 3 — Action or movement
- 4- Connecting with the audience
- 5- Promise
- 6 — Consistency
- 7- Satisfactory experience
- Thumbnail design and YouTube channel optimization services
Is your CTR on YouTube on the floor?
Creating a thumbnail that attracts attention on YouTube requires taking into account the idea or title of the video since a bad video idea won’t get clicks. Additionally, a high Click-Through Rate (CTR) requires a good video title and audience satisfaction.
Once you have conducted the necessary research and optimized your video titles using SEO and Storytelling techniques for YouTube, you can then move on to designing your thumbnail. While you may not be a designer, you can use tools such as Canva to create your thumbnail. After recording and uploading your video, it can be disheartening to receive no response.
Hours invested in creating powerful content that no one ever gets to see. Wasted effort, and the feeling that you are stuck with YouTube. Frustration sets in and you start to believe that the algorithm is simply against you, or that no one is interested in what you have to say.
You get discouraged. Your confidence and self-esteem go down. So does your interest, and you don’t continue to upload videos regularly, or worse, you repeat the process only to notice the same poor results.
And it’s logical because you will also probably be repeating the same common mistakes that I have gone through and seen in the clients I work for.
I want to help you save time and effort, and get the recognition and rewards you deserve for the content you create on YouTube. Getting those initial clicks is crucial to increase impressions and get more people to see your videos.
That’s why I’m sharing with you 7 tricks that you can implement right now to improve your click-through rate and stand out from the competition. The last trick is especially important and can make all the difference to your success.
7 Effective Strategies for Creating YouTube Thumbnails:
1. Use recognizable objects.
In my previous article, I discussed the strategy used by Jenny Hoyos in her YouTube shorts, where she included a familiar object in her title along with the brand’s logo. However, let’s delve deeper into this topic.
When I mention including a familiar object, I am referring to placing it in the foreground or in a relevant way that quickly catches the attention of the audience, generating curiosity and leading them to the title to seek context.
In this regard, a common mistake is to overcrowd the elements and text, causing confusion. It is important to guide the viewer’s gaze towards the most recognizable and captivating object.
The objective is to create a funnel effect by focusing the attention of the audience. This can be achieved in various ways, such as contrasting the object with the background, keeping it simple, or making it unique.
2 — Augmented reality, distorted reality, or aberrant perspective
Distorting reality by accentuating or manipulating the proportion of scales is a common procedure in creating effective miniatures. This technique aims to break the pattern of the ordinary and the normal by either zooming in to focus on a specific element that captures the attention or increasing the field of view to provide a comparative proportion that generates curiosity by confronting magnitude vs smallness.
To achieve the aberrant perspective, the camera needs to be moved away from horizontality, generally by a turn of approximately 25 to 45 degrees. This way, a sense of instability can be communicated to the viewer. Additionally, this technique can inject dynamism into the image through the play of lines.
This technique is not limited to the entertainment industry. Even educational content can benefit from it. For instance, if you plan to make a video about “The 7 Habits That Helped Me Read X Books in a Month,” you can play with scale by holding up a pile of books that make you look small in comparison to the books you’ve read.
3 — Action or movement
After analyzing metrics and designing thumbnails for various industries, I have noticed that one of the most powerful hacks is to work the image as if it were a movie poster. A movie poster can condense an emotion caused by a suggested action or movement in a single frame.
This is simple for content related to the video game industry or blog-type content. However, it becomes challenging when our niche is Amazon sales. For instance, if the video title is “Make 50,000 USD on Amazon using AI,” we can show a person holding a cell phone with euphoric eyes, watching the Amazon sales page, and “sprouting” dollar signs and sales made that flood the screen.
Similarly, if we are in the personal development niche and our title is “Apps that will help you improve your habits,” we can include the logos of the apps surrounding the character, simulating speed.
4- Connecting with the audience
Many YouTubers don’t realize the importance of connecting with their audience beyond the screen. Some of them even take a series of standard photos with standard expressions like “happy,” “angry,” “concerned,” “pointing at,” “pointing to,” “angry,” “concerned,” “pointing to,” etc.
I’m not saying this is necessarily wrong. Sometimes in niches that aren’t saturated, it may even work. However, as the niche becomes more competitive, it becomes harder to compete solely through these thumbnails, especially if our brand has yet to develop a loyal audience that empathizes with our image.
If our goal is to create a personal brand, it should grow by building on elements that already have a connection and empathy with the audience, such as another brand, a product, a story, a context, a situation, or a recognizable character.
We should bring these elements to the forefront at the beginning, instead of relying on typical “mask” faces, which in some niches can be considered “cheap content” or “low quality” and, therefore, avoided.
At a visual and design level, we can work with perspective to bring some elements closer to the point of closest contact with the viewer or of greater relevance due to tension.
5- Promise
When you visit YouTube, you have a specific goal in mind — it could be entertainment, information, inspiration, motivation, education, or something else. You want or need to watch a video that will fulfill that goal.
Sometimes, you make a conscious decision about what to watch, but other times you end up watching something that you didn’t even know you wanted to watch.
The algorithm plays a big role in this, and the thumbnail image and title are the first things that catch your attention and help you decide whether to watch the video or not.
If you want to attract viewers to your YouTube video, you need to use some specific techniques. One of the most important techniques is to create a thumbnail and title that make a promise to the viewer. This promise should be strong enough to captivate their attention and make them want to click on your video.
Whether it’s about making more money, learning something new, having fun, or finding inspiration, your thumbnail and title should be able to deliver that promise effectively. By doing so, you will be able to stop viewers from scrolling through YouTube and get them to watch your video.
6 — Consistency
Steal like an artist but find your style. When it comes to creating content on YouTube, it’s okay to be inspired by other YouTubers. Take the time to analyze what works for them and experiment with incorporating some of those elements into your own videos.
However, if you want to stand out and build your own brand as a creator, your thumbnails need to be consistent with your overall brand identity.
This means that your thumbnail should reflect the tone and type of content you create, as well as the audience you are targeting. For example, if you create videos about financial advisory services, it wouldn’t make sense to use a thumbnail with the same style as Mr. Beast.
On the other hand, if your niche is premium technology reviews, then your visual identity should align with that type of content and audience.
Remember, you can still take inspiration from other creators, but it’s important to be aware that what works for them may not necessarily work for you. The key is to find your own style and make sure that your thumbnail is an extension of your overall brand identity.
7- Satisfactory experience
The thumbnail and title of your video are the first things that viewers see and they determine whether they will click and watch your video or not. So, it’s important to deliver on the promise made in the thumbnail and title.
User satisfaction is crucial for the YouTube algorithm, even more so than retention rate. This is because a viewer might watch the entire video but still not be satisfied. This can lead to the viewer leaving YouTube or not watching any more videos from the creator.
User satisfaction is measured through the continuity of the session, repeated views, or frequent and periodic viewing of other videos from the same creator. Therefore, it’s important to keep this in mind when setting up your channel, scripting, or structuring your videos. And, it’s essential to optimize your thumbnails and titles.
Additionally, the timing of when you publish your videos is also critical. I write about that, in this article. Don’t miss it, follow me on Medium and turn on notifications.
If you’ve made it this far and found the content helpful, I would greatly appreciate it if you could show your support by giving it applause (you can do this up to 50 times!). It won’t cost you anything and it will encourage me to keep creating useful content for you to achieve your professional or business goals through YouTube. Thank you!
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