You may have spent a lot of time, energy and money on producing a video but it doesn’t end there. You need people to click on the video! And that also requires a lot of hard work. Millions of videos are added to the internet every day. The feeds on which your video is displayed have an endless number of videos competing for the time and attention of your prospect. To get your video to stand out, what you need is an enticing title and an attractive thumbnail image.
Your thumbnail image is the face of your video. People see the thumbnail before reading the title of the video. The thumbnail usually also contains text. The text has to entice the viewer to go on to read the title text. The viewer makes the decision to click or not in a split-second, so don’t lose the opportunity thanks to a mediocre thumbnail.
Here are 9 tips to get prospects to click using a great explainer video thumbnail
1. Consistency
As part of your video marketing strategy, you should decide on a style of thumbnails, especially if you are doing a video series. An oft-seen style of thumbnail created brand recall in the minds of viewers. The next time they see a style they recognize from your brand, prospects and customers tend to click on it. Try to maintain the same style of image, fonts and layout in order to build a thumbnail brand for all your videos.
2. Clarity
Your thumbnail text should contrast to your thumbnail image in terms of colour and should be legible. Viewers spend very little time glancing at a thumbnail and, therefore, you need to get your message across as succinctly as possible.
3. Close-up
Try and get close-up shots instead of wide shots for your thumbnails. Videos are watched on big as well as small screens, so it’s best to show close-ups that can easily be viewed on smartphones as most viewers are now on mobile.
4. Exaggeration vs. click-bait
You can exaggerate your thumbnails a little but there is a fine line between exaggerating and being seen a click-baiter. Never use enticing images that are misleading and not part of your video at all. Viewers today have seen all sorts of click-bait titles and these attempts are easily detected and detested.
5. Stay classy
Keep your thumbnails clean in design. Avoid thumbnails that are cluttered with text in unreadable fonts, over-the-top facial expressions and jarring colours.
6. Use Photoshop
You can create free thumbnails on a variety of cloud apps like Canva and Adobe Spark. But if you’ve had your video produced professionally, then your thumbnail also deserves the best touch. Make sure that it’s created on Photoshop professionally for the best click through rates.
7. Don’t be boring
Your thumbnail should look as unique as possible so that it stands out, tells your story and showcases why your viewer will benefit from watching your video.
8. The explainer video cliche thumbnail
Since most animated explainer videos look similar, their thumbnails also tend to look similar. Make sure your thumbnail stands out as compared to other explainer video thumbnails.
9. Blurry default thumbnails are a no-no
Never allow YouTube to select a still frame.YouTube’s algorithm in this regard is not very smart. On Instagram you have to manually select a still frame from your video, so try and have a thumbnail-worthy frame included in the video during editing. YouTube allows you to upload a custom thumbnail and you should take full advantage of that.
Ripple Animation is the best explainer video company in Mumbai and Bengaluru and has created many Explainer Videos across industry verticals.
We’d be delighted to help you make a great explainer video for your business along with a fitting and professionally-made video thumbnail. To know more about how you can boost awareness through a product explainer video for business, please reach out to us via email or visit our website and fill out the short form on our homepage.
Also Read –
There are explainer videos. And then there are GREAT explainer videos.
What Makes a Great Explainer Video