Last updated on January 31st, 2022
With over 52% of traffic worldwide coming from mobile devices, consumers’ behavior has changed. This change has led to micro-moments. In simple words, micro-moments let consumers turn to their smartphones seeking quick answers to their problems. It’s basically an intent-driven action that gives birth to ‘know’, ‘go’, ‘do’, and ‘buy’ moments. Here are some cool tips from Michael Janda on ‘how to create content for micro-moments’.
After your logo, it’s the content that attracts your audience. But the customary content is somehow evolving.
The linear consumer journey is no more in vogue; credit goes to micro-moments. Mobile-powered customers aren’t patient. If your content fails to hit hard on their intent, they’ll go away.
Focusing on that, Designhill organized a Webinar on “How to create engaging content and grow your brand using social media.”
Our guest speaker-Michael Janda gave us some of the best suggestions. He’s the author of the award-winning book “Burn Your Portfolio.” Here we are going to discuss one of the sections-micro-moments Michael elaborated during the webinar.
In a non-linear narrative, micro-moments are classified into four categories:
i. I want to ‘KNOW’ moments
When someone is researching, exploring but is not in the mood to buy.
ii. I want to ‘GO’ moments
When somebody is looking for a local business or considers buying a product at a nearby store.
iii. I want to ‘DO’ moments
When someone wants help to finish a task or trying something new.
iv. I want to ‘BUY’ moments
When someone is ready to make a purchase and need help in deciding what to buy or how to buy it.
When you create content, you need to focus on these four micro-moments constraints. They give you a structure for your content planning.
As far as content type is concerned, there are two types of content — long-form content and short-form content.
Importance Of Creating Long-Form Content
Long-form content is 1200+ words. There you’ll find different ranges if you search 500 to 4000 words. Michal, however, settled with 1200 words.
Long-form content could be a book, an e-book, and a website article like a blog article on your website. These are all versions of long-form content. It could be a 15-minute long video or three-hour-long movie like Marvel’s Endgame.
It’s kind of goes against when we talk about micro-moments. But you will see how this is all going to come together in a minute.
Looking For Social Media Page Design?
We have helped thousands of business owners from all around the world with their graphic design needs such as a logo design, website design, social media posts, banner design and much more.
Get Your Social Media Page DesignGet a Free Quote
Benefits Of Long-Form Content
i. Search Engine Attention
Benefits of building long-form content are that it gets search engine attention. Instagram, YouTube, they all favor content that is longer versus shorter content.
The algorithm favors longer content because the goal of these destinations is to keep the users on their platforms. So your three-minute video has a better chance than your 15-second video on these platforms. It’s because they want to get people engaged with that three-minute video.
ii. Increased Time On Your Site
It is valuable and goes along with point number one. The goal of your website and your social media page is to engage your audience and keep them there. Long-form content hooks them up there for longer.
iii. Proof Of Authority And Expertise
If people find your long-form content valuable, they act and start sharing. This type of content is more likable and sharable than short-form content. They start sharing it as a proof of authority.
iv. Social Sharing
The role of social channels in micro-moments is very crucial. Long-form content with exciting data and info goes viral in minutes. It’s shared across all social channels.
v. More Value To The Reader (Altruistic)
It provides more value to the reader. There is an altruistic nature involved in it. You’re giving a lot of value in long-form content. So, there is a feel-good component, which is beneficial for your brand identity.
vi. Foundation For A Campaign
The average content length on number one in Google is (Top ten search results from serpIQ) 2450 words. The number two has 2500 or above, and then down to number 10 still has over 2000 words. So, the average top ten results in Google have long-form content.
Google, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter — all are favoring higher length of content. It’s because they keep the users engaged for longer period. So, that’s something important that hits directly on why we should start with long-form content.
Here is an example — a few years ago, we were on a trip to Hawaii, and we met Will Smith there. Michael took his boys when they went to talk to him, and it was awesome.
They didn’t bother him too long. Even Michael wrote a blog article around this trip called “Ten Things I Learned About Charisma During 2 Minutes with Will Smith.”
He posted this on his website. Now the average time spent on the blog on his website on this article is 14 minutes 37 seconds, and the blog has 1856 words.
The average time spent on the rest of his website is 2 minutes and 34 seconds. So, this is his little piece of evidence of the value and importance of long-form content.
How To Create Long-Form Content?
Here you will learn how to break the long-form content into micro-moments content.
But before, let’s know how to create long-form content:
01. Define The Goals
What are the purposes of this content? Do you want somebody to purchase the product? Do you want to educate them on a specific topic? Do you want to teach them how to do something through a tutorial?
Do you want them to develop brand loyalty with your product that you sell? Find out your goals first. Without a goal, content is soul-less.
02. Choose A Topic (Keyword Rich)
It is essential to choose a keyword-rich topic. A keyword-rich topic is something that people are searching for. There are different search tools or keyword search tools that you can use.
Google has a free search tool that you can use to do keyword searching. Just do a little search on Google keyword research, and you’ll find ways to search for your valuable keyword topics.
03. Hire A Writer (Or Learn To Write)
If you know writing, that’s good. If not, hire a writer. You need to develop content, and a professional will help you do that.
04. Use Plenty Of Pictures And Sections (Make It Easy To Scan)
You don’t want to have a long-form content if somebody can’t go and scan through it at specific points.
Break it into sections. You can use images to make it more engaging. Long-form content is significant even though your audience has attention deficit disorder (A.D.D.).
You can create the long-form content to break it into small bite-size pieces.
How To Dissect Long-Form Content Into Snackable Pieces
What we’re going to do next is to how to dissect the long-form content into snackable pieces.
Now, Michael’s strategy on long-form content creation comes from this- He has his book — Burn Your Portfolio, Psychology of Graphic Design Pricing, he also has over 13 years of business systems and experiences which help him to create long form-content by leveraging it all.
Take an example of Google that came to Michael with different articles that it created for Harvard Business Reviews. They wanted to publish these articles on Harvard Business Reviews.
Each of the articles is scannable as they have headlines, images, and there are different sections on each one.
So, they have these articles, and they came to Michael and said they have this long-form content and want him to break it into snackable pieces.
For those of you who don’t understand what snackable means, here is sneak peek. This is just like the meal and the snack. So in our analogy, the long-form content means a meal and short-form content is the snack.
Here, we are trying to take a meal and break it down into tiny pieces. This is how it’s done. You start by building a piece of long-form content, and then you scan it looking for sub-topics, data, and metrics, list items, engaging quotes, anything that can be extracted into short-form content.
Scan long-form content for:
a. Subtopics
b. Data or metrics
c. List Items
d. Engaging quotes
e. Anything that you can extract into short-form content.
This is important that you plan out. Scan and look for these things, and then you go to step two in your strategy for general content ideas based on the time buckets.
How To Create Content Based On Time-Buckets
We are going to take this snackable content idea and plan them based on these time buckets.
We break down the content into four categories – Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large.
i. Small (1-30 sec.)
In 1 to 30 second time bucket, create video teasers and social posts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest)
Here is an excellent example of it – McDonald’s YouTube channel. The video is 11 seconds long it’s a small piece of content which is for buy and go micro-moments.
ii. Medium (1-3 min.)
In 1 to 3-minute time bucket, create landing pages, blog articles, and videos.
Take an example of Airbnb’s landing page. It gives you three-step hosting information and takes about three minutes of a reader’s time. Other examples include a blog article from Adidas and a quick video from BMW about their parking assist.
iii. Large (4-7 min.)
In 4-7 minute time bucket, create long videos, long blog articles, infographic, and case studies.
Nike has a lot of long-form video content on its YouTube channel.
Don’t just focus on creating content related to your company. Capitalize on users’ interest to generate refreshing content.
iv. Extra Large (15+ min.)
For 15 minutes and above time-bucket, create extra-large videos, eBooks, white papers, and original long-form articles.
BMW features many movies on its YouTube channel, which are more than 15-minutes long.
HubSpot’s white papers are yet other examples of extra-large content.
Key Takeaways
i. Leveraging micro-moments is key to engage the audience and influence their behavior.
ii. Long-form content presented in a pleasing and informative way is vital to hook audiences for longer.
iii. Break-down long-form content into small snackable pieces for better engagement.
iv. Create content as per four time-slots to fuel your marketing effort.
Want to know more about what Michael Janda suggested?
Watch The Video Of The Webinar
Conclusion
Consumers are no longer paying attention to content until it answers to their queries. They have become attention-deficit more than ever. To make most out of their intent, start creating content for micro-moments. Follow the tips suggested in this blog by Michael Janda to succeed in your effort.