09 Jul How To Use GIFs In Your Digital Marketing Strategy
People love GIFs!
Even if GIFs can only be used to express emotions and share a joke, that’s a good enough reason to include it into your digital marketing strategy.
But GIFs have more uses than that.
Here’s some of the ways you can use GIFs for marketing that you might not have considered before!
Add It To Emails
Did you know Gmail doesn’t allow you to embed videos into your emails? You can only link or attach videos when you send emails and these videos have to be opened separately.
This detracts your customers from the message you want to convey. Emails are not like social media, people read them for quick information and updates—they only click links that are appealing and beneficial to them.
They’re definitely not gonna want to click to watch an ad in an email you send!
GIFs, on the other hand, are considered a type of image file. Thus, almost every email platform—including Gmail—allows the embedding of GIFs.
GIFs are also many times smaller in size than videos, making them convenient to send out in email lists to hundreds or thousands of inboxes.
Most importantly, GIFs spice up your emails with a little animation. Used effectively, they can attract attention and help to convey your message to your audience in less than a minute!
Use Them on Social Media Channels
This might seem like an obvious one, but surprisingly, not many brands are taking advantage of this great marketing opportunity to engage and communicate with their customers!
Most social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, support GIFs and even provide access to databases of GIFs that are free to use. Even Instagram offers Boomerang as an alternative to GIFs because that’s how popular GIFs are!
Audiences like to engage with GIFs. If you post a GIF, there’s a higher likelihood that people will stop to watch it and share it with their friends and contacts afterwards. Textual or static content is not as quickly shared in comparison.
Omnicore found that tweets with GIFs get 55% more engagement than those without—yet somehow, only 2% of all tweets contain GIFs.
So take advantage of the propensity of GIFs to be shared or commented on to engage with your followers and target audience on social media!
Use It On Your Website
If you’ve read our article on video marketing, you’ll know that videos are important in boosting SEO and lowering the bounce rate of your website.
But videos are big and heavy.
Most people keep video auto-play turned off to avoid slowing down their workflow or draining data. If you’re on the go, you’ll be less likely to watch a video embedded on a brand’s site.
This doesn’t mean videos are no good—they are! You should definitely include them on your website.
But GIFs play an equally important role in engaging viewers and site visitors!
GIFs provide the same motion effect video does, but at a fraction of the size. They don’t slow down your webpage loading time and they create visual impact in the middle of text.
Many brands also benefit from making their own GIFs to represent their brand and create a unique visual culture to promote their goods and services.
One way this is done is by replacing the typical page loading spinner with a short GIF that’s relevant to your brand.
You can also create a GIF of your logo instead of using a static .png file to make your website immediately stand out!
Create A Brand GIPHY Account
Where do social media platforms get their database of GIFs for you to use?
Where do you go to find GIFs?
In 2019, GIPHY had over 500 million daily users. People search for GIFs every second of the day to use on platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram etc.
What does this mean?
This means creating GIFs and uploading them to GIPHY can boost your branding potential!
Many brands create a GIPHY account and upload brand-created GIFs for others to see and use. It’s basically social media but for GIFs!
Mountain Dew has one such official account with only 445 GIFs uploaded. But these GIFs have accumulated 1.1 billion GIF views! That’s more than the total engagement they get from 531,000 followers on Instagram with 665 posts.
And GIPHY allows you to optimise the GIFs you upload. You can tag them and make them public to be used by the world.
That’s free advertising dollars you don’t have to spend!
Want to start creating GIFs for your digital marketing strategy? Learn more about our media production services here.
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