Research Your Way to Better YouTube Thumbnails

[00:00:00] Tim: Packaging is one of the most important parts of product marketing. We experience this every time that we go to the grocery store. What are the new products that we tend to be drawn towards? It's the ones with the attractive packaging. So why then, as YouTubers, do we tend to treat our packaging as some kind of afterthought?

[00:00:19] I bet we've all done this at some point. We spend hours scripting, filming, editing a video, and then, we just bang together our thumbnails in the last 10 to 20 minutes before hitting publish. The results are predictable. That video we worked so hard on to produce doesn't get views, because it doesn't get the clicks.

[00:00:37] But there is a better way, and in this video I'm going to share five strategies that I've started using to improve my thumbnail game. And what I've discovered is that it's not just about the strategies, but also the mindset with which you approach the entire endeavor of thumbnail design that can make a big difference.

[00:00:52] Think of it this way: if you have a video that gets 9,000 impressions and it has a 1 percent click-through rate, that's 90 views. If you can increase that to 3%, That's 270 views. But if you can boost that to 6%, that's 540 views. And it's probably even way more than that because as your video gets more click-throughs, it's going to get more and more impressions.

[00:01:15] And I think at the end of the day, the application of these strategies is going to give my videos a much better shot at success, and I hope they're going to help you as well. So sit back, relax, and let's get into it. 

[00:01:30] Hey everyone, my name's Tim, and I share content on photography and YouTube. And let's dive right in with our first category of thumbnail research, which is competitor analysis on YouTube. Now, you might be doing this already, but I think I've found a tactic that could be helpful for you within this strategy.

[00:01:46] So let's head over to have a look at a leading competitor in my niche, Peter McKinnon. You can see he makes videos on photography. He's got 5 million subscribers, his videos are getting millions of views, so he must be doing something right. And we're just gonna look for interesting-looking thumbnails. And I kind of like this one here, where it looks like he's cutting a camera open with a knife. And the title is 8 Camera Hacks in 90 Seconds. 

[00:02:09] So what I'm going to do is go down to Snipping Tool, and then press New. What you can do is you can actually take a photo of the thumbnail. Right off of YouTube there. So you've got a record of it. And so what you're going to do then is save it in a folder on your computer.

[00:02:26] I created a folder called Thumbnail Concepts to do just that. And so once you go in there you can see that the thumbnail is saved there as the thumbnail. And I think this is key because if you don't keep track of the concepts as you find them, you're not going to remember them later when you need them.

[00:02:41] Now, it's important that you don't directly copy these designs, but use them more as a source for inspiration. So, if I were working with this one right here, I might do something like "five camera settings in a hundred seconds," and do a thumbnail with me adjusting a camera with a screwdriver, or something like that. I don't know, you get the idea. 

[00:03:01] The point of competitor analysis on YouTube is to help you build great designs by giving you a sense of what great designs that are working on YouTube right now look like. 

[00:03:11] The next step is to get super serious with this by searching for what's called outlier videos. These are videos that have overperformed relative to the average views of a given channel, which suggests this is a high-performing topic that probably has a good title and thumbnail as well. 

[00:03:28] But the question is, how are you going to find outlier videos? I mean, it's not the type of thing that you can type into Google or YouTube itself and expect to get the results that you need. That's not going to come back with what you're looking for. 

[00:03:43] So for that what you want to do is use a tool called One of Ten Finder. It's specifically designed to help you find outlier videos within specific niches. And to use this tool, what you do is you type in a term like photography and then you're going to hit search. And it's going to return all kinds of different videos that have outperformed the channel average for the selected channels 

[00:04:08] And so here's an example right here, the seven photography mistakes I see all photographers making, and it's getting like 21 times the views of the average views for that channel, so you can tell it's a good performing topic, you can take inspiration from the title, the way the thumbnail is set up. The idea itself, and so on. 

[00:04:29] So these two practical things that we've covered so far are going to help a lot, but what I've found is that they're not going to entirely take you where you need to go. Because to get to a real level of excellence in thumbnail design, you need to understand the theory as well as the practice, and how it all fits together.

[00:04:48] That's what's going to allow you to take all of those practical examples that you're finding, combine them with one another, as well as your own ideas, and create something that's truly unique and that truly stands out on the YouTube homepage. And to get that theoretical knowledge, I'm going to recommend that you watch this video here by Aprilynne Alter, How to Make a Killer Thumbnail to Blow Up Your Channel. It's by far and away the best video I've seen on the theory behind good thumbnail design. And it's well worth your time. And while you're at it, you might as well also watch her video How to Make a Killer YouTube Intro, which is also excellent. 

[00:05:26] And then the third and final one you want to check out is this one called Top 21 Thumbnail Formats to Grow Fast on YouTube by Tyler Fleischman. It works together with a theory to help you understand the types of thumbnails that work on YouTube. I've linked these videos in the description to help you find them. 

[00:05:42] But first, let's finish up here because even if you've got the theory and the practice, you still need to think about how are you going to make designs in a way that's effective and efficient.

[00:05:54] And this is where the use of templates come in. Templates can make the design process a lot faster by giving you something to start with rather than trying to work from scratch. And if you sign up for a software like Canva, you're going to find hundreds of templates that you can use to help expedite the design process and also serve as a source of inspiration in and of itself.

[00:06:19] Another site you can use is called Creative Fabrica, and it also has many different YouTube thumbnail templates, which are editable in Canva or other design programs. But what I really like about Creative Fabrica is the font collection, so it's got all kinds of really cool fonts that you can download and incorporate into Canva to create really standout designs for your YouTube thumbnails.

[00:06:45] And it's that kind of attention to detail that can really help you level up your own designs, take what other people are doing as inspiration, and make it better, make it your own. That's what I did with this example right here, which was my original design, and I revised it by taking a template from Canva, which had this yellow brick background, which was a lot brighter, and then I combined it with the spray paint effect, which is a font from Creative Fabrica, to create something that in the end I think was a lot more eye-catching.

[00:07:19] So that's all good, but here's a question for you. What happens if you've gone through all of the examples on YouTube that you can find? You've looked at One of Ten Finder, you've scrolled through templates, and you still can't come up with a good design on your own efforts. And maybe you just don't have a lot of time to invest in the thumbnail design process.

[00:07:41] Well, that's where the final strategy I want to talk about comes in. And that strategy is to bring in outside help using an outsourcing service such as Fiverr. Fiverr has numerous designers offering thumbnail design services at various price points. And what you can do is go to the budget filter and set a custom price point.

[00:08:05] And the lowest price, uh, seems to be 8, so you hit apply on that. And it'll come back with, again, a lot of designers, uh, that do pretty good work. And in fact, the design that I used for this video, the very one you clicked on if you're watching this on YouTube, was designed by a Fiverr designer. 

[00:08:24] Actually it was this guy right here, Design Master. You can see he's got a 4. 9 star rating, thousands of positive reviews. And so I was quite happy with this work too, and we'll see how it works out with the click through rate, but To me, it just makes sense that bringing in outside help is a great way to strengthen your channel by bringing in skills that maybe you don't have and also saving yourself time so you can focus on the stuff that you do best and have the greatest impact with your own efforts on your channel.

[00:08:53] And the nice thing about a good designer is that they're not just going to follow the instructions that you gave them to create the design, but they're going to actively contribute to making the design better, which is what happened in this case. 

[00:09:06] Okay, but what about the cost, you might ask? Well, I did a community poll and most of us said that we were planning to do 12 videos or less per year. So let's say that's 10 videos. With fees, uh, Fiverr service is 12 per video if you go at the 8 level. So that's 120 a year. But it probably wouldn't even be that much because there would be some you could find through doing competitor research, some you could create through using templates, and others you could create through outsourcing to a service like Fiverr. And so maybe let's say it's talking more like 30 to 40 per year. And in this way, you can still stay involved in the thumbnail design research process. So you keep developing that sense of what a good thumbnail looks like. And that will help you in the future if you do decide to outsource more of them.

[00:09:58] The other thing I'd say is, does it make sense to invest in keyword research tools, and software editing programs, and all these other things to make your videos better, and then not invest in the packaging? The one thing that will make the biggest impact on your click through rate. And therefore, on whether your videos will actually get seen or not.

[00:10:18] So going into my metrics here, we can see, for example, my click through rate right now is a pretty abysmal 1. 2%. And the reason for that is that a lot of the thumbnails on my channel right now are ones that I've designed from scratch without any prior research. But using the strategies that we've discussed in this video, my goal is to get that click through rate up to a more respectable 4 or 5%, which is average for YouTube from the research that I've seen.

[00:10:44] And if I can do that, it's going to significantly improve the growth of the channel. But if you want this to work for you, you want to make sure that you've already optimized your channel homepage. And to help with that, what you want to do is check out this previous episode here, where I talk about a lot of the homepage mistakes that small channels make that really affects the ability of those channels to convert viewers into subscribers.

[00:11:10] Thanks for watching; subscribe for more, and we'll see you in the next episode.