Using gifs for marketing is the latest trend worldwide right now. While gifs have been around for a long time, businesses haven’t been using them for long. The reason for this is that gifs are often perceived as far too personal for serious businesses to use in their marketing messages. This simple impression of businesses kept gifs out of a lucrative aspect of life. However, that has changed recently because of the global shift towards personalisation.
Technological advancements have allowed greater personalisation of B2C services and products, which has, in turn, made businesses realise the value of an up, close, and personal relationship with their customers. It is this shift in thought process that has caused businesses to use gifs for marketing purposes, regardless of their informal nature. There is value to this move as well.
How to Use Gifs for Marketing?
There are three elements to using gifs for marketing. These elements can be best presented in three questions – why, how, and when. In a post at the beginning of this month, we explained the ‘why’ of it i.e. why you should use gifs for marketing as a part of your business strategy. Some points we mentioned in that article were easier consumption, greater retention potential, better ratio between impact and cost, high flexibility, and scope for innovation (you can read the entire post here).
We dealt with the ‘how’ of it in the middle of this month through another post on finding or making gifs online. That post, as the title suggests, showed people where to find stock gifs, edit them, and even how to make them by various techniques (you can read that one, here).
If you read those posts, then you know why you should use gifs for marketing and where or how you can get them. What you still don’t know is how to use them. You can just use gifs for marketing willy-nilly. You need to use them in the right place, at the right time, to say the right thing. This post is dedicated to showing people where and when they should look to use gifs for marketing for their businesses.
Use Gifs for Marketing Your Brand’s Personality
The best way to use gifs for marketing is to exhibit your brand or business’s unique personality. Every business, no matter how formal or professional, has a personality to show. It is all about tapping into that personality and highlighting it publicly. The more unique a business’s personality, the more memorable it will be in the eyes of the audience. Consequently, the more unique the personality, the more effective the gifs will be.
In fact, gifs have been known to work the best for quirkier brands displaying how eccentric they can really get. The trick is to have a distinct and very human personality, though. The reason why showing human traits is important is that people relate more to human seeming brands than they do to sterile corporate houses. Therefore, even if you have a corporate house, you can use gifs to show your human side to your audience.
Use Gifs to Display a Product or a Service
As we explained in one of the posts linked above, videos are too heavy to load and images not as impactful. When you use gifs for marketing, you get to use a happy medium between these two media types. Gifs show movement and mobility while not being as heavy to load as videos. Therefore, if you’ve been using either images or products to display your product or service, then one of the ways you can use gifs for marketing is by switching to this medium.
For example, if you’ve been posting images of a clothesline, what you can do is create a gif of a model moving about with the relevant clothes. This will not only show the fitting of your clothesline but also display the flow and drape of your clothesline. Similarly, for a restaurant, nothing would work better than a gif of their food steaming on beautiful cutlery.
Use Gifs to Push Advertisements
Video advertisements perform far better than image advertisements or banners on the internet. However, all platforms on the internet are not as supportive of videos as they are of images. Those platforms that support images will, fortunately, also support gifs, which means that you can use gifs for marketing by posting your advertisements in the format.
This is, essentially, a way for you to repurpose your existing advertisements after they’ve finished their term on conventional media. Moreover, you can actually run your advertisements in this format on the internet while they’re being run in the traditional format on conventional media. As a matter of fact, you can create low-cost advertisements independently and use them as gifs for marketing too.
Use Gifs to Present Statistical Data
Showing statistical data can be a wonderful way of hammering home any point you’re trying to make. One of the best ways of displaying statistical data is through multiple frames stitched together in the form of gifs. Psychological studies have shown that visual representation of numbers is understood far better than the numbers themselves.
Moreover, visual representations establish context far better than words will. For example, reading words will take time while images convey the message in a glance or two. What this shows is that gifs can be a very effective vehicle for instructional messages and informational branding that some businesses are partial to.
Use Gifs to Break Monotony
Marketing strategies, generally speaking, tend to be very professional, serious, and return oriented. In fact, if there is any one way to describe marketing professionals then it is ‘calculative’. Because marketing professionals are calculative, marketing strategies are also highly logical and goal-oriented. Humour is something that is very intangible and subjective. It is also very difficult to define, determine and qualify.
Resultantly, the majority of marketing strategies and campaigns don’t have humour as an element of their marketing content. However, humour has relevance in marketing campaigns, even though most marketers overlook. What is this relevance? Humour in marketing campaigns helps counter-marketing fatigue. You know, how you start glossing over advertisements and dull updates in your social media feeds because you never get anything interesting from those guys?
Well, that is marketing fatigue. Now imagine that you were getting something funny or interesting every few days or even once a week. You would not ignore that business’s marketing messages and your eyes wouldn’t automatically gloss over their brand names. This is what gifs can do in a marketing campaign. They can break the monotony and keep people interested.
There are various ways through which you can use gifs for marketing and all of them are acceptable. The only danger with gifs is that you’ll end up overdoing it. The inherent informal characteristic of gifs means that you can’t use them frequently. The caveat, here, is that it doesn’t really apply to businesses that want to portray an informal personality. For businesses with a playful and fun personality, there’s nothing better than gifs.
Leave a Reply