Just make sure not to overdue it!

Every startup needs a digital marketing strategy, and having one without incorporating GIFs is, frankly, a waste of time.

The amalgamation of a regular image and a short video has made GIFs extremely popular in the digital terrain and has found much popularity especially with the millennials.

GIFs are attracting immense attention because not only are they easy to view, they offer a call to action. Furthermore, they take less time to enjoy and deliver an emotional impact which can connect your audience to the business immediately.

When Twitter allowed uploading GIFs a few years ago, it immediately led to a digital wildfire with users expressing their excitement about GIFs (amazingly, doing so with GIFs). Since then almost all social media platforms have followed suit and added support for GIFs.

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While GIFs may seem like a recent miracle in the world of digital marketing, animated GIFs have been around for more than two decades now.

Below are a few reasons why digital marketers need to incorporate GIFs in their marketing campaign.

  • With the advancement of technology, the attention span of your consumers is getting lower with every passing day. GIFs are a smart way of reaching your target audience with a living picture of your message.
  • GIFs can engage your potential customers and show how something works – they have the ability to engage the user and have them focus on the desired movement made in the GIF
  • Using GIFs in emailers and other marketing mails have been reported to raise click through rate of the recipients and also revenue by some companies who use them.
  • GIFs are fun to watch. They are repetitive in nature, exude humour and resonate with most of your audience.

How to market GIFs

 

Below are six ways in which you can use GIFs to market your business.

  • Explain a process – If you have launched a new product or services, you can create GIFs to demonstrate how to use it or explaining an application what you are offering.
  • Tell a story – An interesting visual of just a few seconds about your company’s brand in the form of a GIF can say much more than a written story.
  • Use on Social Media Platforms – GIFs are an excellent way to attract the attention of your potential customers on social media. Platforms such as Instagram offer tools such as Boomerang which can create mini videos running on loop and are quite popular with the users.
  • Use it on your website – GIFs can effectively assist you in maintaining minimal content on your website by explaining some of your content visually.

Things to Remember

While GIFs are an effective marketing tool, when it comes to your business, it is imperative to consider how to use GIFs to describe and promote your brand.

Below are a few considerations to make before incorporating GIFs in your digital marketing campaign.

  • Determine which features of your services or product has a differential quality which can be further enhanced with GIFs.
  • Consider a visually appealing aspect of your brand which will be interesting and align with your business message.
  • Review the impact of the emotion your promotional GIF is exuding.
  • Ensure that you have the analytical tools handy to measure the reach, engagement and effectiveness of your GIF.

Making sure the GIFs are not big in size and will not delay the loading time. Also, ensure appropriate functionality.

It is imperative to not over use GIFs in your marketing emails so that your audience does not get tired of them. Should you need to check effectiveness of GIFs over static images, you can do so by running a comparison test with two separate emails.

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There are numerous online tools which have made the process of creating GIFs an easy affair. Marketers can now add life to their promotional material thus, adding flamboyance to the content and improving their overall customer engagement.

GIFs are here to stay this time, and most of all we believe marketers will find new ways of using them even more in their marketing efforts.

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Photo via Amit Sen

 

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