Last week we talked about how Google Analytics can help marketers understand content types and affinities in order to target potential customers successfully. The next step is creating snackable content your audiences are more likely to consume. I always hear people saying its millennials that have the attention span of a goldfish and digest content quickly, but it isn’t unique to one generation, this is the marketing world we live in now. Users spend an average of 1.7 seconds on mobile and 2.5 on a desktop viewing any given piece of social media content, according to Facebook IQ. Goldfish have a nine-second attention span; clearly, goldfish are superior to the human race or are we just lazy and bombarded with white noise!
If you don’t have snackable content that’s eye-catching, interesting and that resonates, you’ll become a blur as users scroll right past your content or leave your website. There’s no shortage of content, so you need to spark their interest. We need to feed our hyper speed goldfish—our audiences—snackable content that resonates with them.
Affinity-Driven Content
Before we begin, we need to know what types of snackable content and subjects will entice our audience. Knowing their interests and understanding what appeals to them will encourage them to stick around longer on your website or come back to see if your content continues to keep them satisfied. Additionally, knowing the frequency and channels your audience expects to consume content from your brand is equally important. Here’s a framework you can complete for your target audience. It helps you breaks down the best channels, frequency and time of day your audience is likely to consume your snackable content.
The way to build loyal, or even just mildly interested, consumers is to target those affinities and interests. I call this “clickable interests.” Social media platforms supply users with content that aligns with their affinities and confirmation biases, so your way in is to target those interests. You can find these affinities through Facebook Audience Insights or Google Analytics.
Call to Emotion
Emotion-based marketing intends to drive curiosity or excitement instead of sales or conversion. There’s a reason Nike is the second most followed brand on Instagram, instead of pitching a product, they establish their brand through emotional appeals that will attract their target audience. Emotions will drive sales further down the line, but its strength is building the initial relationship between the brand and the audience.
If you’re unsure of how to employ the emotions in your marketing, there is software to help you. Persado’s AI marketing language finds the right emotional appeal to consumers by analyzing various words or phrases that convey specific emotions. Persado examined emails in the retail, eCommerce, travel and hospitality industries from May to August 2017 to find marketing insights for summer campaigns, and found the subject line words and phrases that yielded opens 90-100% of the time. Try them in your summer marketing campaigns to brighten up performance rates.
Be a Sore Thumb
You want to stick out…like a sore thumb. Don’t follow the masses, be unique and create content that is identical and essential to your brand. With all the content published continuously, it’s vital to stick to your brand identity so that you don’t fade into the noise. I see a lot of “copy-cat content” these days—blogs that merely take published ideas and phrase it differently. It might be a good topic, but who’s to say your target audience will click on your blog rather than the thousands of others?
An excellent way to create unique and resourceful content is with infographics. These visually-heavy fact sheets break down wordy information into appealing images and quickly understandable ideas. Infographics are ‘liked’ and shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content. According to Moz, Infographic and Infographics are searched an average of 175,000 times per month.
If you don’t have bandwidth in-house to create infographics, Canva and Infogram have templates and tools to help marketers develop infographics with ease.
Short and Sweet
Standing out also means producing content for audiences to consume quickly, hence, snackable. We read or watch curated content to feed our appetites and fill our time to learn about topics that interest us. Quick, concise and to-the-point videos, GIFs or “listicles” (articles that appear in the form of a list), fill our audiences’ bellies just enough to get to the next point in their day. As marketers, we can become a resource for our audiences, hoping to bring them back in the future for more rich content.
GIFs are our current favorite and appeal to a generation obsessed with memes. As we transition to visual communication, people use emojis or GIFs to communicate their emotions because words on a screen don’t do emotions justice. Especially in email marketing, GIFs are safer for recipients that might be hesitant to click on a link to the video because it could be a virus. GIFs are also eye-catching and differentiate your email from other marketers’. Wistia ran an experiment on the influence of GIFs on twitter and saw over 25 times the number of media views and 3-5 times the number of likes on tweets that include GIFs. Online tools like GIPHY or Tenor make selecting the right GIF easy.
It’s a noisy internet, so finding the right mix of unique, affinity-driven, emotionally appealing content will help you speak louder and reach your target audience. These techniques are ideal for creating snackable content in a 1.7-second attention-span world.
