Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

<pingback>...Tape Marketing Blog: Are you Feeding the Snack Culture John Jantsch’s post on the “snacking culture” stories in Wired: “I still believe that white papers and thought provoking, education based marketing ...</pingback>

<pingback>...minutes to about 10-30 seconds. What do you think? Info Duct Tape Marketing This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 9:46 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS ...</pingback>

John and community:

As a video producer the bite sized chunk focus is something we take advatage of. We have broken video seminars into small chunks for web distribution through the client's site and partner sites.

Thank you for bringing this snack to our attention.

John

Being fully aware of this trend, we devised our newsletter for small business owners, Gritty Business Buzz, to account for this particular online behavior. No long articles that require an investment of time to read. Instead, we have very specific sections, and each section each month provides bite-size items that are easy and quickly digested.

This post looked great, but I was too busy to read past the first paragraph....

Can you break it down into four posts?

Seriously though, I think you're dead on.

We've started to do short product videos that we host on YouTube and Google Video and Yahoo Video, and embed on our site.

If people don't want to read about the product, they can watch the video about it instead, where I personally talk about the product and demonstrate it.

I'm getting thousands of video views, and people are actually finding the videos directly on the video sites sometimes instead of finding them on our site.

We shoot them all ourselves, and I edit them on my Mac and add an intro with our theme music, company name and URL, so that the videos work by themselves as an info nugget no matter where you find them.

(And yes, they are very effective at selling. We get comments all the time that people bought from us instead of Amazon or some other site since we actually taught them something about the product and aren't just some drop shipper who has never even seen it in person.)

The beauty of it is that I am confident that most of my competitors would never take the time to do something like this, so it should set us apart for a long time to come.

I love the idea about tip of the day.

That's something we've been working on too, in fact. We're going to throw it into Wordpress so that we can offer it as an RSS feed.

Each one of those daily tips also turns into a long tail web page too, so you are slowly seeding all the search engines with good, solid content about a subject that your potential customers are interested in.

Strong content and short pages often float right up to the top of the search engines. Especially when they are about niche subjects or ideas.

It's win win win. Google gets good information to serve up, the site visitor learns something, and the seller gets additional sales from the qualified web traffic.

I agree totally. Knowing who your target and their expectations are key pieces to the puzzle. But so is testing what works. Snacks come in jumbo and bite sizes and so should the materials we serve up for our consumers.

Creating smaller succinct messages saves time and takes people less energy to absorb.

Most of what is said in a page can be summarized in a paragraph. Natural evolution really.

I too love the small bits idea, altho I think that daily for an email campaign might too much, but great in a blog format. Matching the length of message with the time and attention span of your readers is a great way to get your point across, thanks for highlighting this John!

Maybe this is why Twitter is so popular...

This is EXACTLY what my blog caters to. Thank you John for giving me a word for it. The Snack Culture (though mine may be more the busy executive culture). I knew there was a reason (or two or twenty) that I link to this blog all the time.