Make Your Content Searchable, Shareable, and Snackable

So you’ve adopted the methodology of inbound marketing and started producing content to share with your target audience. Although you seem to be on the right path, you may still experience shortcomings in the form of visitors, leads, and customers. But how could that be happening? You’re creating quality content; why aren’t your prospects consuming it? Not to worry, I have some quick tips for you that may help.

Below, I’d like to share some thoughts for making your content more successful by making it more searchable, shareable, and snackable.

Searchable

First of all, you need to give your audience the ability to find your content. If they can’t find your content online, they won’t be able to consume your content and interact with your brand.

Searchable content captures the passions and pain points of the consumer and is optimized with trending keywords, boosting the content’s search ranking. With that said, it is crucial to conduct your due diligence when creating an editorial calendar that ensures your content will be searched for and found. Ultimately, your content should answer the questions, leverage the pain points, and use the language of your target audience.

Lastly, do not force the use of keywords to improve SEO. Sure, the inclusion of trending keywords is helpful towards making your content searchable, however, it is more important to provide your audience content that has value and relevance. Therefore, I suggest being genuine with your content writing, allowing the keywords to organically appear throughout your ebook, blog, infographic, video, etc.

Shareable

People love sharing content online. In a study by The New York Times Customer Insight Group, it was discovered that there are five key reasons we decide to share something online with our network:

1. To bring valuable and entertaining content to others.
2. To define ourselves to others.
3. To grow and nourish our relationships.
4. Self-fulfillment.
5. To get the word out about causes or brands.

As a content marketer, this information is invaluable. Accordingly, I have included the same five reasons below, with the implications for marketers alongside.

1. To bring valuable and entertaining content to others – You absolutely must provide value to your readers every single time you publish content.
2. To define ourselves to others – Help your readers define themselves with interactive content like checklists, quizzes, etc.
3. To grow and nourish our relationships – Try ending some of your posts with questions to start a conversation via comments. This will help you further connect with your readers.
4. Self-fulfillment – Through comments, readers are induced with a feeling of involvement and fulfillment. Make sure your content inspires them to share.
5. To get the word out about causes or brands – Feel free to promote causes and brands (especially your brand).

Tip: Take time with your title. A lot of users just read the title of a piece of content and immediately share it with their network without actually consuming the content. Surprising I know!

Snackable

Stop thinking long-form and start thinking snackable. Snackable content is made for the on-the-go consumer who needs answers to his or her questions in a moment’s notice. When done right, snackable content leaves the consumer hungry and eager for more.

Producing snackable content can help your business get found, grab consumers’ attention, and drive traffic to your site. It is designed to be bite-size nuggets of information that can be quickly consumed, understood, and shared. Videos, quotes, infographics and memes are all good examples of content that can be made snackable.

Also, you don’t always have to create new snackable content. Reusing existing content by changing the format is a great way to pique the interest of your audience and revitalize your content strategy. Take content from an old ebook and make an infographic; take a video and create a vine; take a series of images and turn them into a GIF. You get the picture.

Additionally, many of today’s leading social media sites are structured to help you produce and share snackable content. Sites like Twitter, Pinterest, and Vine enable their audience to choose quick and useful information that is relevant to them, creating higher levels of user engagement.

There you have it. To assist towards the success of your content, always remember to make it searchable, shareable, and snackable.

Happy writing!