Snackable content

Did someone say snack?

I wish. But this is not a blog post about food. It’s about snackable content. 

We’re always looking for new ways to engage and interest our audience. That same audience doesn’t always react best to long content forms. They want something they can consume quickly and share consistently. That is where snackable content comes in.

So what EXACTLY is snackable content you ask? According to Hubspot, “Snackable content is straightforward, short-form, easily digestible content that lends itself to being passively consumed and shared on social media. It tends to be visually engaging, can be posted consistently, and is often used to support overarching campaigns.” Sounds fun, and I bet you came across it a thousand times.

But, why is snackable content so important? In an age of information overload and busy work lives, effective communication often requires the essence of the message to be delivered in the shortest time possible. Many platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are built to serve this need and thrive with content such as memes, gifs, photos, and short videos — all of which are short, easy to digest, and able to be shared across social media. The internet today is buzzing with bite-size content, so snackable content is an important part of your content strategy. But which snackable content will work for your business? The best way to find out is by A/B testing.

If you want to know more about content marketing, you can learn here on our blog.

Snackable content forms

While you can find a lot of snackable forms online, I will write about the 4 most popular:

• • • Quote graphics – A compelling quote can capture attention in itself, but supporting one with captivating visuals adds a new dimension to the interest it can generate. Quotes from influential people or excerpts from interviews and articles are one of the most straightforward types of snackable content. When posting quotes, it’s a good idea to tag the person being quoted. You never know your luck – you might even earn a repost.

• • • Memes – It is the era of the meme and thank goodness. Memes perfectly encapsulate snackable content as a concept. They’re immediate, specifically tailored to be entertaining, and can be easily scrolled through and shared. If you’re using memes to support your marketing efforts, you need to be more careful than you might assume. Corporations have been known to co-opt different meme formats and run them into the ground. That being said, if you can consistently make entertaining memes tastefully — without upsetting or irritating the members of your audience that are really into memes — you’ll wind up with a wealth of delightfully snackable content.

• • • Infographics – Infographics can add a bit more meat to your content snack and don’t necessarily need to be boring facts or figures. What they should do, however, is teach people something quickly. Simple ‘how to’ or ‘did you know?’ answers can be remarkably effective. 

• • • Gifs – Don’t you just love gifs? Animated gifs have become part of our online vernacular. Gifs are a simple and effective way to capture people’s attention with movement. Original gifs are similar to original memes – they have tons of sharing potential, but just as much potential to be dead on arrival. If you intend to create and share gifs over social media, put effort, thought, and fine touch into them. And always have multiple people look them over.

Want to know how to create great content on a budget? Read it here on our blog.

Meme marketing

I believe that most of us have social feeds filled with memes. Most of the memes are by the people we follow, but every once in a while, a brand will post a meme and add their own spin on it. When it’s done right, those are the brands whose content we engage with the most. And with that, we come to the term meme marketing.

Meme marketing is the use of memes to promote your brand narrative. It’s a fun, low-effort way to connect with your audience.

But what does the meme help with? Good memes make fun of a situation. It’s one of the foremost things to put on a meme’s CV. Thanks to this making-fun attribute, you can use memes to have fun with your audience and connect with them by sharing an inside joke. On top of that, if your meme goes viral or popular among your followers, you’ll be able to increase brand awareness and Instagram growth and other platforms for that matter. So that’s a great plus when it comes to planning memes as part of your marketing strategy.

Not to mention, a good meme can encourage engagement as your followers share it with their community and leave comments about how they can relate to the situation that the meme emulates.

So, briefly, a meme can help you in three ways:

• Connect with your target audience
• Increase brand awareness
• Boost engagement levels

Those benefits sound great, don’t they? In order to achieve them, you need to create awesome memes. Let’s go through a three-step framework of creating a meme.

How to create a meme

The best place to start is by learning about your audience and their pain points. Once you’ve done this homework, follow these steps:

1. Pick a problem – Almost every meme shared so far stokes a problem. Because that’s where a good meme starts and so should you. Think of a problem that you can aggravate or make fun of, so it will be easy for you to create an effective marketing plan. This problem is what will help you get attention.
2. Aggravate the problem – Rub the problem you’ve picked. Memes are a reaction to everyday problems. By figuring out how you’ll rub the problem, you’ll make a reaction-based, fun-packed meme.
3. Target all of the above to your audience – The last but crucial step is to make sure your problem resonates with your target community. Make sure the image and text you’re planning to create your meme are relatable to them.

Brands with a strong meme game

As I said, most of the meems we see online are from a certain person. But let’s dive in, and have a look which brands are crushing it right now.

• The beard club – The Beard Club is a beard supplement provider with a super-specific audience – bearded males. To keep their bearded club members engaged and attract new ones too, the brand’s Instagram channel frequently makes fun memes that are relatable. The meme below is one example of the lot. So let’s start looking at what gives this meme a full score on the meme scale. For one, the images are on-point and of good quality. Next, the meme pairs relevant text to explain the images. Although the dates on both the images pretty much do the talking, the text clarifies and explains further. Lastly, they tailored the meme for their audience so it’s both clear and relatable for them. It’s also worth pointing here that the meme is time-sensitive. It picked up a trend and made a meme out of it.

• Netflix – Movie Bird Box. Everybody has heard of it, and a lot of people have seen it. But also a lot of people said it was really bad. Something isn’t adding up. When Netflix first released the movie, it had bad reviews and it didn’t feel original (movie The quiet place). The way they got the buzz around the movie, is first through a Youtube challenge, that would end up in… you guessed, MEMES. Because of a huge number of memes on the account of the movie, 26 million people watched it. Based on the online buzz, it’s safe to say many of those millions of people were driven to watch Bird Box—a film that most people also agree is bad—just to better understand the collective conversation online.        Bird Box is the cynical inverse of your typical pop-culture meme. Though it has all the necessary visual ingredients that help a movie spread online, viewers seem more attached to the memes it has generated than the movie itself.

• Chipotle – Chipotle has a knack for being creative at everything they do. From their TikTok videos to Instagram memes, they ace it all. This meme, in particular, is brilliant on a whole new level. So what makes this meme unique? A couple of factors, starting with how they’ve made a meme from their product using a few emojis. It teaches us: you don’t need to rely on an outside picture when you can put your own product into the spotlight creatively. Next, the meme’s text is pretty rad. Most of all, it sends a clear message to their audience – you can have Chipotle even when you’re broke so there’s something for everybody! Lastly, the overall quality of the meme is epic. If this would’ve been a picture taken poorly, the whole meme could’ve fallen apart.

Stats

In the sea of gifs and memes, how many are there? How many are sent daily? There are fun stats all over the internet, so I’ve gathered a few.

First, let’s see Giphy statistics:

• 700 million daily users
• Giphy daily serves 10 billion gifs
• 11 million hours of Giphy content viewed daily

Meme statistics:

• this isn’t a statistic, BUT, you can’t count the number of memes there are online
• 55% of 13-35-year-olds send memes every week
• 30% send them every day
• 38% follow meme accounts on social media
• 74% send memes to make people smile or laugh