Your Audience is Hungry for Snackable Content — 3 Ways to Serve It Up

When you’re standing in line to order coffee or waiting to meet someone who’s running late, you’re probably zeroed in on your phone to pass the time. But when you’re only looking to kill five minutes, you’re probably not going to read a 1,000-word article — and certainly not a full eBook. You’ll gravitate toward something short and easy to consume. In the marketing world, we call that “snackable” content.

Snackable content is mostly geared toward mobile users. U.S. consumers spend a whopping five hours per day on mobile devices. By creating and promoting shorter content, companies can get on potential customers’ radars while they’re waiting for the person in front of them to order a grande in a venti cup, half soy, half nonfat, iced double-shot caramel macchiato with two pumps of vanilla, extra caramel drizzle, extra whip, and light on the ice.

In the tl;dr world, people have a limited attention span. With an exponential amount of information at your audience’s fingertips, you should be delivering quick, engaging content — that’s hopefully shorter than that coffee order — to stand out. Here are three types of snackable content and when to use them.

Capture attention with video
There’s a good chance you’ve come across one of those infamous Tasty videos while scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed. Watching someone make cinnamon rolls and chicken parmesan garlic bread in under 120 seconds is addicting and makes cooking look easy. Videos like the ones you see on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are perfect examples of snackable content. They’re short, they grab your attention, and they’re easily viewable on any device. Plus, content with visuals gets 94 percent more views, which is reason enough to give them a try.

When should you use video? Videos can be effective when you want to tell your company’s story in a personal or visual way, or when you want to offer a step-by-step tutorial on how your product works. (64 percent of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.) You can also use video to provide quick, behind-the-scenes snippets of your company, which can be done using Snapchat or Instagram Stories. (Bonus: Making an effective video for social media typically doesn’t require a big production budget.)

Inform with infographics
Twenty percent of people remember what they read, but 80 percent of people remember what they see and do. Infographics help you condense a lot of information into one compact visual piece. Plus, you can often create them using content you’ve already published. For example, you can repurpose information from a piece of long-form content into an infographic by pulling out statistics and other bite-sized elements that your audience can digest at a glance.

When should you use them? If you’re looking to highlight complex data that’s hard to digest in written form, an infographic can make it much more appealing. You can also use infographics when you want to display survey data or compare products and services. Plus, infographics are known to be shareable online, so they can also be effective in driving traffic to your website.

Interact through quizzes
Have you ever taken a quiz to find out what kind of dog or which Friends character you are? People take quizzes to better understand themselves and how they relate to others. From a content marketing perspective, quizzes can help you guide customers through a buyer journey and generate leads. For example, you can use a quiz to find out if a user already has one of your products, and then make recommendations for some of your other products or services based on the answer.

When should you use quizzes? You can use quizzes as an interactive way to educate your customers about your industry expertise or to guide them to one of your solutions. For example, you can ask questions about their pain points, and then offer educational resources to help address those challenges. Or, if you offer a service with multiple price points, you can guide prospects to the right pricing tier by asking questions to assess their needs. While your prospects or customers engage with useful and relevant information, you also gain insight into their interests and behaviors — which can help you create even more relevant content in the future.

Your content doesn’t need to be long to be engaging. There is a time and place for long-form content, but these days, situations often call for something short and sweet. Especially when it comes to your mobile strategy, short content wins. If you need help creating that content, just reach out.

About Right Source:

The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.