Effective content performance hinges on "packaging," which encompasses the elements that initially attract and retain viewer attention, such as titles, thumbnails, and hooks. Neglecting packaging creates a significant disadvantage, as even the best content will fail if it's not seen.
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If your content is underperforming, the
main reason why that's happening is the
packaging. This is the number one area
all my smartest creator friends obsess
over. And if you don't know what
packaging is or have a strategy for it,
you're at a massive disadvantage. Cuz
here's the truth. If you have bad
packaging, you don't even really have a
chance of making content that's going to
perform well. So, if you want to grow
faster and make sure the time you spend
making content is worth it, packaging is
the area you need to level up. Now, in
this video, I'm going to break down 10
tactical tips and frameworks to help you
improve your packaging immediately. And
once you hear these and incorporate them
into your process, I guarantee your
videos will start crushing. By the way,
I'm Callaway. I have a million
followers. I've done billions of views.
And content is all I do all day long.
All right. Now, the first tactical tip
to understand is what content packaging
actually means and why it's so
important. Packaging for YouTube is the
title, the thumbnail, and the intro of
the video. The first 30 to 60 seconds.
Packaging for social media is the first
line of the caption, the thumbnail, and
the hook. The first 3 to 5 seconds. Now,
here's why packaging is the most
important aspect of the content
workflow, and why the smartest creators
I know spend most of their time focused
on it. Imagine in front of you was a
table full of gifts. Now, on the table,
they're all different shapes and sizes.
Some laced with bows, some in bags, some
with colorful wrapping paper. You get
the picture. Now, if I only gave you one
second to look at the table and pick a
gift, which is the first one that
catches your eye? For most people, it's
going to be that gold one on the right
hand side. Now, why is this? For one,
the packaging of the gold one is
generally different and more
eye-catching than all the others. It
pops out more. And just like a deer in
the woods, people notice things that are
atypical from the conventional pattern
because the human brain is trained to
spot differences. Now, if I told you to
walk up to the table and pick one of the
gifts to unwrap, and you weren't trying
to be cheeky, you would probably go and
pick the gold one. And the reason for
that is because the gold one looks most
valuable to you, and you're curious to
figure out what value is inside. This
one-two punch of initial awareness and
then rapid valuebased curiosity is the
cheat code to winning packaging. And in
this video, we're going to get into a
bunch of tactical psychology tips and
tactics that you can use to improve your
packaging so more people click and
watch. But just to finish the metaphor,
here's really why content packaging is
so important. For all the gifts on the
table you don't pick up, they might as
well have been empty boxes on the
inside. Because the truth is, it doesn't
matter what's inside if no one ever
looks. Think about it. If each of those
gifts represented a piece of content you
spent hours making, but nobody ever
picks them up and unwraps them, well
then what's inside might as well have
been 15 minutes of black screen. Mr.
Beast is famous for saying, "If they
don't click, they don't watch."
Packaging is the art of getting the
viewer to click and start watching in
the first place. And if you can't do
that, literally nothing else matters in
the content workflow downstream. Now,
before I go on to the next point and
give you all the tactics and tricks that
I personally use, one more point of
clarification on this whole metaphor.
You might be thinking, "All right, the
gifts on the table thing makes sense for
YouTube because we're looking at a home
feed of thumbnails and choosing what to
pick." But on social media, I don't get
to choose. The feed just serves up
videos. So, how does that make sense in
this whole thing? on social media. With
short form video, instead of having a
table full of gifts that you choose,
you're getting served gifts one at a
time on the feed by the algorithm. And
with short form video, it's the
packaging's job to get you to stop
scrolling and choose to unwrap the gift.
So, it's a bit of a different mechanism,
but it's the exact same game. Whether
it's YouTube or social media, the
packaging must get the viewer to opt in
and watch or nothing else matters. Now,
if you believe what I'm saying about the
packaging, and you should, you're
probably thinking, "All right, just tell
me what to change with my packaging so
it's better and more people watch." And
so, let's do that. First, I'm going to
go through a rapidfire list of
frameworks and tactics that apply to
YouTube packaging for long- form
content. And then, I'm going to do the
same thing, different tips and tactics
for short form social media packaging.
If you care about content, I recommend
watching the entire thing because the
pieces are different, but the psychology
applies to both. And spoiler alert,
there are about eight gems in here that
I have never heard anybody talk about.
So, let's dive in. All right, packaging
tip number one for YouTube is about
contrast and color science. Here's how
YouTube actually works. After just a few
hours of watching on YouTube, a viewer's
homepage is going to start having more
and more videos from the same niche or
category. If you like watching marketing
videos, you're going to start seeing
more and more marketing videos show up
on the feed. Now, typically the design
meta for thumbnails in a given niche
tends to converge on the same aesthetic
and colors. And that's because most
people are lazy. And so, if one person
in the category rips, everyone just
copies what they see and does the exact
same thing. What ends up happening is
that when a viewer looks at a grid of
thumbnails in a given niche, nothing
pops out because all of the design and
colors look the same. And in this case,
the one they end up clicking on is
anything with a recognizable face, like
a big personal brand or a famous person,
because the colors never grab their
attention. However, the easiest way to
get your packaging to pop, especially if
you're smaller or not as wellknown, is
by inversing the color meta of the
category. So, for example, if the
thumbnail design pattern in your niche
is typically dark and busy, then go
light and minimal. If your category is
typically colorful and bright, then go
monochromatic. And there's actually
proven neuroscience behind this. The
brain processes colors and brightness
much faster than it can interpret
objects and text. So if you just inverse
the colors, brightness, and orientation
of the design in your category, you'll
get a lot more people to stop and pay
attention to your thumbnail initially.
Now, the best way to figure out what the
design meta is of your niche or category
is to use a tool like Click Pilot, add a
bunch of the top channels, zoom out,
look at the grid, and try to assess what
the color pattern or design pattern
looks like. When you slot your thumbnail
into this grid, does it pop out or not?
If not, and your face is relatively
unknown, then you've got a packaging
problem cuz your thumbnails will not be
clickable relative to the field. So, the
takeaway for this first point is this.
If your niche on YouTube converges on a
particular color science design pattern,
inverse it so yours can pop and contrast
more. All right, lesson number two for
YouTube packaging goes along the same
lines. And if you've been making YouTube
videos for a while and they haven't been
working, I guarantee this one's going to
piss you off. Here's a fact that I
learned way too late that really matters
for packaging. More than 80% of YouTube
viewers are scrolling on YouTube in dark
mode. That means the dark gray or
blackish background on your phone or
desktop. So, if you've designed your
thumbnails to pop on the traditionally
white screen and you've used some
darkish grayish background, well, when
you flip to dark mode, if they don't pop
out, you're cooked. So, this tip is
critical. When you do all the color
science and contrast work that I just
mentioned in the first point, make sure
you're doing it on dark mode. You have
to pop against the field and against the
background of your phone and desktop in
dark mode. This is a super easy fix, but
a huge design mistake that a lot of
people are making. All right, packaging
tip number three for YouTube is
understanding packaging psychology.
Here's how the psychology actually works
when someone is scrolling through
YouTube and trying to decide which
thumbnail title combo to press. It goes
like this. They see thumbnail, title,
thumbnail, click. That is the flow. Let
me explain this. I mentioned this a
little bit before about how the brain
process, but let me explain this here.
When the brain is rapidly processing for
information, it goes through two stages.
The first is called bottoms up
processing. And this is where the visual
cortex can assess things like colors,
motion, brightness, and broad
orientation, but it's not crystal clear.
It assesses those things rapidly. Think
of it like a blind person that can
barely see. They can't really make out
exactly the letters and objects, but
they could see colors blurred. They
could see motion happening. That's how
your brain works rapidly in real time.
It happens in like 200 milliseconds. So
the very first step in packaging
psychology and what happens in real time
all the time on YouTube is that as
someone's scrolling their brain sees a
different color, different brightness,
some motion popping out of the corner of
their eye, and that's what initially
locks them on to seeing if something's
interesting. So that's step one, the
initial thumbnail. They haven't actually
looked at it and comprehended what it
is, but they've just aimed their
attention towards it. That's step one.
Now, step two is once they aim their
attention, typically a viewer will
glance down at the title. They won't try
to diagnose the thumbnail first. They'll
go title first. And this is because
thumbnails have a lot going on. Even
though there's more contextual
information to process, the load and
processing power required to understand
a full thumbnail verse read a couple
words is high to low. So, the brain
seeks the easier path, which is to read
the title and try to understand what it
means. Now, on the first go of reading
the title, most viewers don't fully
comprehend the sentence unless it's
perfectly worded. However, their eyes
catch a few keywords and they start to
build a comprehension map about what
that sentence actually means. Obviously,
the more they comprehend of the title on
that first look, the better. This is why
shorter titles on YouTube typically win.
People absorb a higher percentage and
they get the meaning quicker. So, at
this stage on the title comprehension,
they're really asking themselves, is
this a go or no go? No go, they skip and
go to the next one. go. They need more
information before clicking. Rarely will
they click on the video just by reading
the title. They then look back up to the
thumbnail. And this is step three. So
again, I'm going through the psychology.
It's initial thumbnail, title
comprehension, go no-go decision, back
to the thumbnail. That's where we're at.
But this time, when they see the
thumbnail, their brain has shifted into
a different processing mode. It's called
top down here. They're actually
ingesting the objects, the graphics, the
text, and they're trying to make sense
of what it means. The first thumbnail
exposure was just colors and brightness.
Now they're actually going for
comprehension. When they deduce
comprehension from the thumbnail, if
that matches the keywords or meaning
that they derive from the title and
they're interested, they're going to
click. Now, like I said, this is super
nerdy, but knowing this flow, how
someone actually progresses through the
thumbnail, title, thumbnail, click flow
is very important because at each stage,
something could go wrong and then you
can know how to fix it. Here's the gut
check you should be running. First, like
I said, go into Click Pilot, put your
thumbnail in a sea of others. If you're
not even noticing it initially in the C,
well, then you have a problem at that
first step. That's a color, brightness,
motion issue. If you are noticing it,
but then once you read the title, you're
just not curious enough to go back to
the thumbnail. Well, then you have a
problem with title clarity and
comprehension. Going through this 1 123
step process will help you understand
where your packaging is failing so you
can improve it more quickly. All right.
All right. Now, if you like the lessons
that I've gone through so far, I've
spent the last couple months in secret
working on the god tier YouTube growth
playbook. Literally everything I know
about YouTube, all the nerdy stuff, all
the psychology systems, AI workflows,
templates, everything you need to win on
YouTube, all in one. There is nothing
even close on the internet to this thing
that I'm putting together. Now, I've got
a weight list link in the description
for this. I might only drop it one time
for one day and then it's closed
forever. I'm not yet sure how we're
going to do it, but I promise you if you
think you might want to hear my full
comprehensive advance mode and give you
my system for growth on YouTube, I'd be
on that wait list. That's all I'm going
to say for now. All right, tip number
four for YouTube packaging is going to
sound obvious, but I guarantee a lot of
you are making this mistake. I call it
trust quality. Here's what's really
happening in a viewer's brain when
they're deciding to click. And this is
different psychologically from what we
just went over. What a viewer is really
doing is voting with their trust that if
they watch a video and spend their time
that it will solve a problem or give
them value back. They're trying to
assess a score of how well they trust
the video will be able to do that. And
this dance of assessing that trust is
going on real time every single time
they look at a title thumbnail
combination. And so here's an easy
framework to think about this. This
really helped for me. Imagine a viewer
has a trust score of 1 to 100 with every
single title thumbnail combination that
they see. And so as they look at the
title, the thumbnail, the creator's
name, the amount of views already on the
video, and all the other attributes that
they can see, they're trying to assess
that score from 1 to 100 on if this
video will actually deliver the promise
made. Now, if a viewer really has a
problem that they need solved, they
might be willing to drop that trust
score down, let's say, to 20% or 20 out
of 100. So, anything that's over a 20,
they're willing to give it a chance
because they really want that problem
solved. If a viewer doesn't really want
a problem solved, the trust score
required to get them to click might be
80 or above or 90 or above. And so, the
packaging combination would have to be
above that to get them to click. Think
of it kind of like based on what a
viewer needs, they set a line, and then
any packaging above that line, they're
likely to click on it. Now, there are
all sorts of attributes and factors that
go into this big pot to help the viewer
decide what their trust score is for a
given package. The biggest two, of
course, are the comprehension they get
from the title, what they think it
means, and the comprehension they get
from the thumbnail, what they think it
means. But another huge one to fix that
really helps boost your trust score in
the viewer's eyes is the design quality
of the thumbnail itself. Is the photo or
graphic you're using sharp or is it
blurry? Is the headshot well lit or does
it look DIY? Is the font big enough to
read and clean and laid out clearly?
Does it look tasteful or does it look
slapped together? In other words, is the
thumbnail well-designed? I'm not talking
about the comprehension ability of it,
although they go hand in hand. Just from
a design aesthetic, when they see it,
does it look professional and above the
line they would expect to see on YouTube
or below? The quality of the design is
actually a sneaky important factor in
moving that trust score line up or down.
And if the design is crap, if it doesn't
look good, it really hurts the trust
score. And so if you have a really
poorly designed thumbnail, the only
people that are going to click on it are
people that really, really, really have
the problem you're talking about. And so
their trust line is all the way down to
like five. If you don't have design
skills, pay someone who does. Thumbnails
are the most important thing and the
cheapest thing to solve for. I've got a
link in the description below to the
thumbnail guys that I like. If you guys
want an intro, totally fine. If not,
find somebody that can solve this
problem for you if you're not good with
design. All right, packaging lesson
number five for YouTube is the intro of
the video. Now, I haven't talked very
much about the intro so far in this
video, and to be honest, I could make a
whole other video on intros alone, but
here's the best tactical tip I could
share about the intro so you can improve
your packaging. The title thumbnail's
job is to get the click initially and
pass that viewer off to the intro. The
intro's job is to transition between
that positive emotional expectation from
the click and the first hit of value
they get in the body of the video. The
intro is the middleman bringing the
viewer from one to the other. If the
intro can bridge the viewer from click
to value, it has done its job. Now, if
you study YouTube and you know what
packaging is, you've probably heard the
phrase confirm the click a million times
before. Now, to make sure it does this,
ask yourself this. based on the title
thumbnail, what should the viewer expect
to get out of this video and then say
that thing in the intro as soon as
possible. So, for example, the title of
this video you're watching right now was
this. Why the smartest creators I know
focus on packaging, not content. And
then in my intro for this video earlier,
I literally said this. In this video,
we're talking about content packaging.
If your content is underperforming, the
main reason that's happening is the
packaging. This is the number one area
my smartest creator friends obsess over.
So, the first, second, and third lines
of the intro were literally repeating
the title verbatim because I wanted to
confirm the click. That click
confirmation took me 4 seconds. And
that's an example of what good intros do
to feed the viewers expectation and
confirm it. All right, now I'm going to
transition to the short form social
media side of the house and packaging
tips for that. By the way, I have a lot
more of these YouTube packaging tips in
the holster. So, if you want me to make
another video just about YouTube
packaging, comment something like more
YouTube chef and then I'll know in the
comments what that means. And also, if
you like the way I'm laying these out
and you're an entrepreneur, I built a
free community with 65 trainings just
like this for you. It's a bunch of
business owners trying to get better at
content. We have 33,000 people in there
and like I said, it's completely free.
It's called Wavy World. I got a link in
the description for you if you want to
join. All right. Now, as promised, I
want to go through a few tactical
packaging tips that apply to short form
video and social media. Now, as a
reminder for short form videos, what
does packaging mean? It's the first line
of the caption, the text that shows at
the bottom above the fold. It's the
thumbnail, and we're going to get to
that later, and most importantly, it's
the hook, the first 3 to 5 seconds, all
three parts: visual, spoken, and text.
Now, as I said before, because short
form videos get automatically served up
in the feed, the packaging has one less
job. It doesn't have to get you to click
and watch, but it does have to get you
to stop and watch. And I call this
opting in. You have to get a viewer to
stop scrolling and opt in to wanting to
watch. Now, the only thing that matters
for that opt-in is the hook. And that's
why this first tip that I'm going to go
through for short form packaging is all
about the clarity in the spoken hook.
The hook matters so much more on short
form than YouTube. And here's why that's
true from a psychology perspective. On
YouTube, you get to use the static title
and thumbnail to build some expectation
of what the topic will be about. So, as
long as the intro confirms that
expectation, you're golden and they're
going to watch. But on social media, the
viewer is seeing your video coming in
completely cold. They have no previous
context on the idea. They weren't
expecting it to come, and they have no
idea what you're talking about when they
start watching. So, you need that
initial hook to both focus them on you
and build that expectation loop about
what they're going to expect in like 3
seconds. This means that the clarity of
the messaging in the hook has to be so
dialed that it both informs the viewer
what the video is going to be about and
inspires them to want to stay because
they trust that that value will be
transferred. Now, I've made tons of
videos about short form hooks. I've also
made a lot of videos about hook script
writing specifically and I will link
those in the description below. But
here's the 8020 tip when it comes to
clarity in spoken hooks. If you cannot
read your script back, just the hook
part, first line or first two lines, and
both immediately know what the video is
going to be about and have enough
curiosity to want to keep reading, the
hook's not good enough. So, it's
absolutely critical that you compress
the hook down so the clarity is
maximized and the curiosity is
maximized. That's tip number one. All
right. Now, tip number two for short
form or number seven overall is about
the visual hook. Now, the visual hook is
made up of the actual visuals that show
in the hook when you run it. And I want
you to think back to that section for
the YouTube part where I talked about
how the brain perceives color, motion,
and brightness differently bottoms up
than it does top down. If you want your
hook to jump out and separate from
everything on the feed, all you have to
do is ratchet up the color, the motion,
and the brightness. Now, you can't do it
too much where you turn it up to the
point where it overwhelms, like a
flashbang or a strobe light. And you
also can't do it to the point where the
visuals disconnect from what's being
said and the clarity goes down. So,
those are two potholes to avoid. But if
you can just turn up the color and the
motion and the brightness a little bit,
you'll win. You literally stun the
subconscious brain into focusing on the
video. And this works because people
cannot outrun their own neural
processing. They cannot intentionally
try to not care about those things. It's
programmed in the DNA. So more unique
colors, more motion, more brightness,
that's all you need. Now, that might not
hold them. That's all about the
storytelling and the script writing.
That's a different video. But if you
just want to stop the scroll, that will
help a ton. All right, lesson number
eight is about the text hook. And if you
haven't watched any of my other videos
on hooks, now you know there are three
core components that make up a short
form video hook. You have the visual
hook, which is the visuals being shown,
how they're laid out, and what the
visuals are. You have the spoken hook,
what is being said. And then you have
the text hook, any words that are being
shown on top of the visuals. Now, the
text hook is typically not the captions,
the word for word you're saying, but
usually it's a title text or title hook
that is extra words that pop up at the
beginning that help give the viewer more
context on what the video is going to be
about. Now, if you don't use text hooks,
you don't use title hooks. Point blank,
you should be. And most of the best
short form videos you see, they are
using text and title hooks because of
the processing speed. Yes, people see
visuals before text, but they can
process reading words before they can
hear them. So, if the visuals act like a
stun gun, which holds them on, the text
hook will act like initial context so
they know what the video is going to be
about. Cuz your choices for context are
text or speech. And like I said, text is
faster to process than speech. The speed
of light is faster than the speed of
sound. people see and contextually
understand faster than they can hear,
think, and process. So, if you want
another advantage in improving your
packaging for short form videos, start
using title text hooks. They can be any
font, any size, any color treatment, as
long as they pop out on the visual and
your eyes go to it. And by the way, if
you struggle with hooks the most for
short form video, I actually have a
couple things that'll make it 100 times
easier for you. In Sandcastle.ai, which
is my content super tool that I've been
building, we just released our latest
hero feature, which is the hook vault.
This allows you to save any hook from
your videos or other videos into a
reusable component. So, for example,
let's say you see a video that crushed
and you really like the hook and you
want to save that hook as a template
that you can then use to generate your
own hooks for different topics. In
Sandcastles, you can literally just
press save to vault. We will transcribe
that hook, convert it into a Mad Lib
format that works for any topic, and
then when you're using our script
writer, you just one-click press, and we
will write new hooks in that style. It's
sick. This is the easiest way to solve
hookw writing. And once you build up
this vault of winning hooks, you'll
never have to think about hooks again.
If you want to try it for free,
sankcastle.ai. All right, here's another
social media packaging tip that most
people will not talk about. I think
short form video thumbnails actually
matter a lot more than people think. And
when I say thumbnail, I'm talking about
the static image that you see that shows
when you're scrolling someone's feed.
Now, of course, the thumbnail has
nothing to do with the video actually
being served up on the feed and getting
people to watch initially, but after
it's posted, it has a lot to do with
three core use cases. For one, and most
importantly, when your video gets shared
in a group DM, like on Instagram, it
gets shared via DM. The thing that shows
in the DM is the thumbnail. So, the
people in that DM aren't guaranteed to
click it, but if the thumbnail's good
and compelling, they might. The
difference between five people in a
group DM clicking and watching your
video versus two is massive when you're
talking about thousands or tens of
thousands of shares. So, a better and
clearer thumbnail will get clicked more
often. That's why I spend an extra 5 to
10 minutes on my videos custom designing
my own thumbnail. Now, the second reason
the thumbnail matters is because when
you're trying to convert a new fan into
a super fan, they're going to hit your
profile and try to binge 6 to 10 more of
your videos in one session. The easiest
way to get them to binge the right ones
is to make thumbnails where it's clear
what each video is about. The more they
see they actually like, the more they're
going to watch and the easier it'll be
to get them to become a super fan. If
someone goes to your profile and you
don't have the thumbnails optimized,
you're missing a huge opportunity. And
the third thing is having your
thumbnails dialed helps with the
aesthetic of your profile, which matters
a lot when someone hits it and tries to
convert to a new follower. So, while all
three of those use cases don't mean more
initial watch time on the feed, they
matter a ton downstream that will lead
to more fans and more followers. A few
people talk about this, but I think a
custom thumbnail can mean a massive
difference. So, be sure to either select
a frame from your video, one-click
select, when you upload that has
contextual information, or design a
custom one on Figma or Canva. All right,
the 10th and final packaging lesson for
short form video is to make sure the
first line of your caption is optimized.
This is called above the fold. When you
look down in the feed, you see a few
characters, usually one sentence before
the dot dot dot. Again, this is really
important because this is more surface
area to help provide more context if the
viewer is confused about the video.
Here's how it'll work for a viewer.
They're going to stop from the motion
and colors. They're going to watch the
first 3 to 5 seconds of the hook, maybe
read the title text. At some point, they
might consider bouncing, but they'll
look down and read the first line of
that caption. If it's written in a way
that induces curiosity or teases what's
coming, they might hold on and keep
watching. I would treat this first line
of the caption like a title and try to
build a curiosity loop in it. And again,
while this is a smaller thing, don't
sleep on it. It's extra surface area
that could help retain the viewer. All
right, guys. That is all I've got for
this video on packaging. As explained,
packaging is the number one most
important part in the content workflow.
It's the most slept on, the fewest
people know about it, but it's actually
sneaky the most important. And as a
recap, for YouTube, packaging means
title, thumbnail, and the first 30
seconds of the intro. For short form
videos on Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn,
YouTube, Facebook, and any other
platform you're posting short form, it's
the first line of the caption, the
thumbnail, and the hook. the first 3 to
5 seconds. In this video, we went over
10 tactical tips that you can implement
immediately to instantly improve your
packaging and help people click and
watch more. As always guys, I'm trying
my absolute best to cover the things
that most people don't. That's why I go
down these kind of nerdy psychology
rabbit holes. That's why I cover these
outside the box tips. So, if you like
that, please consider subscribing and
let me know in the comments what your
favorite piece was. And lastly, if you
like this video and you're a business
owner or an entrepreneur and you just
want an accountability group or other
people that are trying to get better
with content, you should definitely join
Wavy World. It's completely free. It has
all the curriculum, but also you can
find a community, a network of people at
your level as well. So, I got a link in
the description for that if you want to
join. And we will see you guys on the
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