Build and Improve Your Snackable Content Strategy
Harness the power of social media algorithms and spice up your digital marketing strategies with snackable content. Below, we break down what snackable content is, why it’s worth doing and how to create your own. Read on for the hottest snackable content marketing tips and visual storytelling methods.
What is Snackable Content?
Snackable content is short, engaging, and digestible content designed for quick consumption. Perfect for social media, snackable content is highly effective at grabbing audience attention and building brand voice through memes, GIFs, user-generated content and more.
Why is Snackable Content Important?
Snackable content is important for both B2C and B2B marketing, offering shareable content that users can consume on the go. These days, it’s common for people to hop onto X or Instagram while they’re waiting for their tea to brew or for a queue to go down.
The average social media user sees so much content that the real challenge is getting them to stop scrolling, take notice of your brand and invite others into the fold. Here are some key reasons why you should have snackable content in your marketing strategy.
Striking
In the dense digital ecosystem of the internet, where attention spans are short and AI slop is growing, snackable content is essential to reel in your audience. In a sea of content, let your digestible posts be the life raft people can spot and rest on.
Shareable
Social media is the home of shareable content. Most platforms have their own version of duplicating posts publicly and sending content privately. Snackable content is compact, accessible and easy to pass on, amplifying your reach and boosting brand awareness.
Engaging
Entertaining and easy to understand at a glance, snackable content encourages users to interact by liking, commenting, sharing and clicking. Engagement like this signals that your content is desirable, leading algorithms to suggest your posts to more and more people.
Types of Snackable Content
Memes
Officially, a meme is a cultural information unit that’s replicated and spread, but we know them today as viral images and videos with text. Memes draw on pop culture references and, when used by brands, constitute reactive content: timely content that responds to current events or trending topics to make the most of popularity and connect with audiences in real time. Often funny, relatable and short-lived, memes tend to be shared by users on social media platforms like X and Instagram.
GIFs
A GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, is a continuously looping animated image file. Highly shareable, they can go viral if enough people like and use them. Their short, visual nature means that you can use GIFs for just about anything: showing users how to do something, previewing products and services, conveying an emotion or reaction, and so on. The most popular GIFs reference memes or moments from film and TV, making them a go-to storytelling method for brands with a less formal personality.
Infographics
Infographics summarise information as an image, presenting statistics or steps as eye-catching and digestible visuals. Users can glance over the illustrations to quickly grasp key points, which are easier to remember and share than a wall of text. When used in digital marketing strategies, visually appealing infographics can boost your brand’s credibility and help to reach new audiences on multiple social media platforms. They hit the sweet spot between entertaining and educational.
Short videos
With the rise of platforms like TikTok, short videos have grown in popularity as a type of content and revolutionised the art of visual storytelling. Many other sites have jumped on the bandwagon, including Instagram (with reels) and YouTube (with shorts). This type of snackable content is easy to consume and has strong potential to go viral, especially if kicking off a trend. Short videos by brands could include behind-the-scenes footage of the team at work, demos, influencer reviews and more.
Interactive content
Users like interactive content because it provides a more engaging, personalised and memorable experience than static content. It turns passive consumption into active participation, allowing users to feel involved, receive immediate results and break up the monotony of scrolling. Multimedia content like polls, games and quizzes not only encourages engagement, but also helps you gather information about your target audience and tailor future snackable content to their preferences!
User-generated content
User-generated content is one step up from interactive content. This is content that, you guessed it, users create, such as reviews and blog posts that customers share on various platforms. People often consider the experiences of others when deciding where to shop, making user-generated content one of the most effective audience engagement techniques. Incentivise customers to generate content by offering promo codes or discounts for referring other users or sharing their thoughts online.
Tips for Creating Snackable Content
Research - Determine the interests, preferences and pain points of your target audience to create content that resonates. Buyer personas can help here, as can engaging with your audience on social media and analysing their responses.
Experiment - Try out various snackable content formats to keep your visual storytelling fresh and appeal to diverse audience preferences. Don’t be afraid to experiment with things like meme templates and trending audio.
Optimise - Most people consume snackable content on their phone, so it's crucial to customise your content with this in mind. Ensure your content is easy to read on small screens, loads quickly and performs well on different mobile devices.
Simplify - Simple, clear and concise content is great for grazing, kind of like small packets of crisps. Since the aim of the game is to deliver information quickly without overwhelming or boring your audience, consider short sentences your friend!
- Empathise - Everyone likes to feel seen, and relatable content is the most shareable. This comes back to understanding your audience, along with their common questions and quibbles.
Tips for Building a Snackable Content Marketing Strategy
Mix - Just as you incorporate a mixture of short-, mid- and long-form multimedia content into your marketing strategy, you should use a variety of snackable content types. This is a popular audience engagement technique.
Match - Align the snackable content type to the platform. Identify the strengths, weaknesses and main audiences of each channel. TikTok is best for snackable video content, while X users are more likely to appreciate your GIF game, for example.
Measure - Analyse the performance of your snackable content to uncover what works best and help you plan future posts. Most social media platforms offer in-app analytics to business accounts, giving insight into your audience interactions.
Map - Schedule your snackable content using a calendar to keep track of what you have and haven't posted. This will help you cover everything without repeating yourself and incorporate a healthy mix of different types of snackable content.
- Repurpose - Save time and resources by recycling longer-form multimedia content, editing as needed to fit your intended snackable content type. Interviews could be condensed into highlight reels or recreated as popular memes, for example.
Is Long-Form Content Dead?
The short answer is: no. There will always be a place for longer content in marketing and internal communications. Snackable content encourages users to begin a journey with your brand, enhancing, not embodying, digital marketing strategies.
Mid-form videos are used to increase sales, develop trust and explain products. Between one and five minutes long, they often appear as customer testimonials, adverts and explainer videos.
Long-form videos incorporate more structure into a story and offer an opportunity to connect with audiences on a deeper level. Over five minutes long, they are best saved for product tutorials, interviews with key people and documentaries.
A well-rounded content marketing strategy uses all three forms. But whether you’re shooting short, mid- or long-form content, collaborating with a professional video production agency makes it even easier to realise your strategy vision.
Create Snackable Content with Reel Film
Not sure where to start with snackable video content or visual storytelling methods? Reel Film would love to craft quality videos for your social media platforms that connect with your audience and communicate your brand in a uniquely engaging way.
Check out more of our award-winning work or contact us to ask about producing professional multimedia content for your business. You’ve got the bucket, we’ve got the popcorn.
