The world of marketing and advertising is cutthroat to say the least. Whether you’re a business owner or employee, it is likely that you’re selling something somewhere. In fact, even if you’re unemployed, it is likely that you’re marketing the idea of being unemployed so that people don’t judge you. While you will drop the campaign the moment you get employed, you’re still selling it in-between jobs. Humour aside, though, marketing and advertising permeates through everything these days.
The competitive nature of the industry is based on the fact that marketing and advertising permeate through everything. This cutthroat competition, however, means that novelty is not very common when it comes to advertising and marketing. As a matter of fact, 99 percent of novelty in this field comes through content. If you’re a marketer or advertiser, there can be no doubt that you understand this little fact. However, what if we were to tell you that you’re wrong? What if we told you that there’s a marketing element that you’ve been neglecting all this while? Have you ever considered marketing gifs seriously?
What Are Gifs Really?
There are various elements that advertisers and marketers use to get their point across to the right audience. The most common three are text, images, and videos. Gifs are really just an amalgamation of all those elements. Even if they are a mishmash of all those elements, they still need to be considered as a separate element.
Specifically speaking, gifs are moving images that may or may not contain text. At the same time, they aren’t videos simply because the number of frames in a gif is significantly lower than the number of frames in a video. The key point here to note is that because gifs are a mix of all the traditional content delivery elements, they have the advantages of all of them. What are these advantages? Let’s have a look through them.
Consumption of Marketing Gifs Is Easier In Various Ways
Gifs are a mix of all other content elements. This makes them significantly easier to consume than their parent elements. For example, a gif is quicker to consume and understand than a text update would be if the message being conveyed was the same. Similarly, a gif can say much more than an image can, which means that gifs can be more detailed. Finally, gifs are lighter, quicker, and more adaptable than videos. They also tend to require less bandwidth if one considers their load times.
All these benefits combine to make marketing gifs highly effective when it comes to getting the message across. Since a large part of marketing and advertising is to get a user to be open to receiving your promotional messages, gifs end up being a great asset for marketing departments, regardless of the industry they operate in.
Marketing Gifs Have High Retention Potential
The direct impact of the fact that marketing gifs are easier to consume is that they offer a greater retention potential than all other content elements. For example, easier and quicker consumption means that gifs will be consumed by more people. At the same time, their visual appeal means that the message being conveyed by the gif will be retained by the viewer.
Message retention directly affects brand recall and brand character establishment. Anyone involved in branding a product, service, name or company will tell you that this is a highly desirable effect of a marketing campaign.
They’re Impactful While Being Cost Effective
Returns are a major considerable for most marketing and advertising departments as well. Whether a business is large or small, that business will always try to get as big a bang for the buck as it can. This means that Returns on Investment (ROI) are critical for that business. ROI can be simply defined as sales generated vs. money invested.
In terms of returns, videos are known to be very effective in marketing and advertising. Unfortunately, videos are easily the most expensive content element when it comes to this industry. Text has the least impact but it is the cheapest. Images are more impactful and costlier than text but less impactful and cheaper than videos. Marketing gifs are considerable cheaper than videos while being as effective. Therefore, ROIs from marketing gifs are incredibly attractive, if they can be used effectively in a campaign.
Multiple Platforms Support Marketing Gifs
Another reason why you should incorporate marketing gifs into your strategy is their adaptability. We mentioned that gifs are adaptable earlier in this post but we didn’t explain how. Gifs are adaptable with respect to the platforms being used. You can use your marketing gifs virtually anywhere online. This includes social media networks (whether they accept videos or not), blog posts, forums, and emails.
Gifs have been known to boost email marketing conversion rates in the same vein as videos. On social media gifs tend to have greater engagement metrics than the other elements, especially if the element of content inside those elements is discounted for.
Finally, mobile devices support gifs which includes mobile versions of websites and even messaging applications. For instance, sending a gif over a messaging app is much faster than less data consuming than sending a video. All this adds up for greater engagement.
Marketing Gifs Promote Innovative Thinking
Gifs in marketing and advertising are booming. More and more businesses are adopting marketing gifs by incorporating them into their marketing strategies. In simpler terms, marketing gifs have already started making inroads in the world of marketing and advertising that was, till now, dominated by images and videos. Even though their use is going, gifs should be seen as a new element for the marketing industry to explore.
The reason for this is that the use and applicability of marketing gifs hasn’t been explored fully yet. There are still untapped innovative ways that can be tapped to market a business or a brand via gifs. The trick is finding those gaps. This is why it can be said that adopting marketing gifs will push your marketing team towards innovative thinking.
In order to use gifs in your marketing, you’ll have to mentally invest in lateral thinking. You can either make gifs from scratch i.e. clicking images or making videos or you can make gifs out of existing media. Movies, films, images, and user generate content are all fair game when it comes to making gifs.
So long as you combine various sources to tell your story and attribute appropriately, the world is your oyster. This investment in lateral thinking can be very beneficial for marketing campaigns because new avenues and even newer market segments are often discovered in this manner by marketing teams.
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