GIFs are everywhere: people just love them to express their emotions, thoughts, or simply crack a joke, and they’re very popular to just look at. In fact, studies are showing that marketers who master this artform get better results even than video marketers.
Why?
Well, as it turns out, they straddle the divide between textual content and videos. They’re easy to digest, without requiring the time that a video can require. They take seconds to watch, and often make people laugh, and their visual nature makes them an instant attention grabber, particularly for younger people who are always on the hunt for a cool new GIF to add to their catalog.
They’re also great for visual storytelling, which is becoming more and more important in this age of gnattish attention spans – all the best marketing relies on a story to help it make an impact, and you can take advantage of this through GIFs, telling a story through familiar GIFs.
The good news is that with so many GIFs commonly available, you don’t need to spend hours, days, or weeks developing your own, and you can instead use pre-existing GIFs to get your message across. As few marketers have really fully jumped on this bandwagon yet, it’s also an easy way to jump ahead of the pack, especially on social media.
There’s only one thing that you really need to remember – and that is to make sure that they are relevant to your message and what you want to say. If you’re posting inappropriate gifs that don’t quite gel, it will be noticed and cause damage – so never do that!