🚀 Have you been intrigued by the way certain brands use GIFs to grab consumers’ attention and boost their engagement rates significantly? Are you looking to learn how to use GIFs for your own business?
You’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, we’re going to discuss why you should be using GIFs, as well as go over four distinct strategies for using GIFs to generate more engagement for your brand’s content.
🎯 Why businesses need to start using GIFs
The popularity of platforms such as Giphy, Gfycat, and Tenor (recently acquired by Google), as well as the overwhelming use GIFs on social media and messaging apps should give you a clue into the importance of businesses taking advantage of the format to both keep up with the times and ensure maximum engagement for all the content they produce and publish.
Millions of GIFs are shared every day
Tenor reports that users generate more than 12 billion GIF searches every single month using their app. Giphy, on the other hand, has more than 500 million active users that send out as much as 7 billion GIFs every day.
Social platforms have embraced GIFs too. 23 million GIFs are posted on Tumblr every day, while Facebook Messenger users exchange as much as 5 million GIFs on a daily basis.
GIFs allow you to present a lot of information quickly
People use GIFs to express their feelings and personalize their communication with friends, family, and colleagues.
In fact, as much as 69% of Americans state that they use GIFs frequently when communicating with friends.
Most GIFs are fairly short, making them the perfect type of content for today’s busy, attention-deficit consumer. There’s also the fact that people process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.
They’re a great way to connect with your audience
GIFs are personal, relatable, and fun. They’re also more affordable to create and use compared to other visual forms of content, such as videos or animation.
Using them in your messaging can help your business develop a stronger relationship with your target audience. GIFs are also a great way to present your brand as more approachable and human.
They’re an excellent storytelling tool that can help you elicit an emotional response from your audience. GIFs can also be used to explain complex processes and present data in an interesting and captivating way.
Using GIFs can improve the results of your marketing campaigns
Brands such as Adobe, Dell, Nike, Chanel, and Kate Spade have already taken advantage of GIF marketing. Large brands such as these are using GIFs to generate user engagement and improve awareness of their brand and products.
The results of Dell’s GIF-centric email marketing campaign have been floating around marketing blogs for a while now.
By using GIFs in their email marketing communication, the company managed to achieve a 42% increase in click-through rate and a 103% improvement in conversion rate. This ultimately led to a 109% increase in revenue generated from email marketing.
🚀 How to use GIFs for business
Now that you understand the importance of using GIFs to communicate with your audience, let’s look at specific ways you can utilize them to increase brand awareness, improve engagement, and grow your business’ revenue.
Grab attention on social media
With millions of posts being shared on social media every day, it can be hard for your content to stand out. GIFs are a great way to grab attention on social media and make users stop and interact with your business.
The frozen pizza brand DiGiorno has seen great success with using GIFs on Twitter. Their GIF posts have resulted in ten times more engagement compared to regular image posts.
Make your emails pop
Apart from helping you grab attention on social media, GIFs can also enable your business to improve the engagement rate of your email marketing campaigns.
The food delivery service Blue Apron uses them in their emails to both grab customers’ attention as well as make them crave Blue Apron’s delicious meals.
They also include a limited time offer and a highly-visible call-to-action in their emails. This ensures maximum engagement rates for each email they send.
Liven up your blog posts
An excellent way to liven up your blog posts and make them easier to digest is to sprinkle a few GIFs throughout each post. This will help to lighten the mood, as well as break up long sections of text and make your content easier to scan.
GIFs can also be used to demonstrate processes explained in your blog post, as can be seen in Huffington Post’s blog post on scarves.
Show off your products
GIFs can also be used to show off products in a more exciting and engaging way. By taking advantage of GIFs for product promotion, you’ll have an easier time standing out among all the other businesses that are still relying on static images to showcase their product offering.
The clothing retailer Kate Spade has been using GIFs to introduce their audience to new products for a while now, taking advantage of the format to showcase a product’s variations in a single image.
🎯 Best practices for creating and using GIFs for your business
- Make sure it’s relevant – Your GIF needs to be relevant to the content that surrounds it. Don’t use a GIF just for the sake of using a GIF.
- Keep it short (under 5 seconds) – The point of your GIF should be to captivate your audience, so don’t risk losing their attention by creating a long GIF.
- Limit the use of text – GIFs are all about the visuals, so avoid using too much text in your GIFs.
- Brand it – Try to include a visual element of your brand within it (e.g., your company’s logo).
- Keep your brand’s values in mind – Your content should align with your brand’s values and personality.
- Consider shareability – Is the GIF you want to use something that your audience would enjoy sharing? If it isn’t, find another GIF you can use.
- Implement tracking – Plan a way to track how your audience responds to your GIF. This will ensure that you have data that you can use to improve your strategy and use GIFs more effectively in the future.
🚀 Start using GIFs with Gifing
Are you looking for the perfect GIF for your next blog post, email campaign, or social media post? Gifing has thousands of GIFs you can use to make your content engaging and fun.
Create an account today to get access to our entire library of high-quality GIFs!
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Adrien ✔️