Snackable Content - The Key to Boosting Your Brand Awareness
Today's brands often find that to keep their websites relevant, fresh, and appearing at the top of search engine results, they need to produce a regular content stream. However, many readers aren't spending that much time checking out the content a specific brand has to offer. The average time on a blog post may, in most cases, reaches just 3-5 minutes—which means that readers aren't absorbing most of the content on the page.
Snackable content offers the solution to both regular content production and a focus on the part of the content that readers most want or need to see.
What is Snackable Content?
Snackable content is short, easily digestible content that is easy for customers to take in and share with others. A long-form blog post or video might be considered a "meal"—content in which the consumer must invest more time and effort—shorter-form content is more of a "snack" that readers can take in quickly and pass on to someone else.
Snackable content may include many of the same content you're already producing and marketing for your brand, including video, text, and images. However, it's usually absorbed in a much shorter period of time. It might, for example, include shorter snippets of video rather than a longer-form stream of content, or it might consist of memes and short-form infographics instead of longer-form posts.
The Benefits of Snackable Content for Your Brand
Snackable content has several inherent benefits for your brand.
1. It keeps your brand front of mind for consumers
When you use snackable content, you keep your brand at the forefront of consumers' attention. Today's consumers may spend much of their time online, including an average of 147 minutes on social media daily. Still, they also tend to scroll aimlessly without paying considerable attention to any one snippet of content.
Snackable content as part of your digital content marketing allows consumers to receive regular connections with your brand in a form that fits the way they're already browsing—and doesn't disrupt the rest of the user's online experience.
2. Snackable content is designed for mobile.
More than half of internet browsing occurs on mobile devices, and many people are more likely to use mobile devices for personal internet needs. Snackable content is designed to be consumed on a mobile device, and it's short, loads faster than long-form content, and is generally easy to view on a mobile screen.
3. Snackable content is designed to help boost engagement
Snackable content can often be designed for interaction and doesn't require an in-depth reply to an ongoing thread. In most cases, it simply draws in the user and invites them to like, share, or offer a brief comment on the content. As a result, consumers are more likely, in general, to engage with your brand and more likely to remember that engagement when they have needs in your industry.
4. With snackable content, you can put a great deal of information into a relatively short form
Snackable content is designed to be short and sweet. Users know that if they want to learn more, they can turn to your website or follow a link for greater engagement. However, you can offer a lot of information within a relatively short period of time when you pull it together into snackable form.
5. Snackable content is easy to share
Your users are one of your best sources of new engagement. People enjoy sharing things with one another, especially when they come in short snippets that users feel their friends and family members are likely to take in quickly and appreciate. Snackable content is expressly designed for sharing. It comes in a form that's easy to copy, screenshot, or share with others. As a result, you may find that more people can find your website.
6. It's easy to scale snackable content to use across multiple platforms
With so many social platforms to choose from, it can be difficult for brands to determine where to focus their marketing efforts in order to get the most significant impact. Snackable content makes it easy to share content across multiple platforms, including your social media platforms and your website.
Popular Types of Snackable Content
Snackable content can take various forms, depending on what you want your snackable content to accomplish and how users prefer to connect with your brand. It's essential to continue testing the different snackable content types to see which ones perform best with your target audience for your digital content marketing.
In general, however, the most popular types of snackable content include:
Short quotes/snippets of information (ideal for social media posts, for example)
Images with text are shared more often than either images or text alone
GIFs—pictures come to life!
Memes, which are great for sharing a laugh and helping to engage consumers better
Infographics can help share large quantities of information in a relatively simple, straightforward form.
Short video snippets can help call out the parts of a more extensive video that consumers need to know about or that will most likely encourage them to check out the whole video later.
Choosing the correct type of snackable content can significantly impact overall brand reach and engagement. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to produce multiple kinds of snackable content from one more significant piece of content.
How to Create Snackable Content
Are you ready to start creating snackable content for your brand? Start by looking at long-form or existing content that has performed well for your brand. What are people searching for, and what do they engage with more? When you know those answers, you can create snackable content that most effectively fits their needs.
Long-form content is certainly not dead. Long-form content is the key to providing deeper-level answers to many consumer questions and establishing your brand as an expert in your field. However, breaking up long-form content into shorter, snackable content can help create better overall engagement and reach.
Pull Out Important Facts or Quotes
Look at your long-form content and pull out important facts or quotes. Consider:
A surprising fact that will gain attention
An exciting or useful quote
Something in the content that will make your reader laugh
Content that is relatable
What are the critical details in your long-form content? Are there specific details that people might relate to or that they would be looking for more often? If so, that could be a starting place for your snackable content.
Break Down Longer Posts
Have you created top tips posts or countdown posts? Consider breaking those down into shorter, snackable content pieces. For example, suppose you have created a Top Ten Tips for Your Industry's Biggest Thing post. Each of those tips can quickly become a snackable post. Add images or turn them into GIFs to help improve engagement.
Be Funny and Relatable
Memes are among the top-shared pieces of content across multiple industries. As part of your snackable content creation, look for opportunities to create memes. Pull out relatable quotes. Relate to popular media. Highlight your industry professionals and familiar faces. As you do, you'll find that you can often create large quantities of snackable content relatively easily.
Keeping up with the changing requirements of SEO and social media engagement can help you improve your brand's reach.