Why The Smartest Creators I Know Focus on Packaging, Not Content

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 value-based 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 rapid-fire 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 well-known, 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 processes, 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 versus 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 sea, 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 1-2-3 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 waitlist 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 advanced mode and give you my system for growth on YouTube, I'd be on that waitlist. 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 viewer's 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 80/20 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 Sandcastle, you can literally just press "save to vault." We will transcribe that hook, convert it into a Mad Libs 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 hook 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, TikTok, 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 next one. Peace.