Gif marketing? An image that says more than a thousand words!

The GIF, which came into the world in 1987 thanks to programmer Steve Wilhite, is no longer just a short animation meant to entertain viewers. Yes, it is still one of the most popular formats online, but its potential is becoming increasingly visible in marketing. Today we'll explain why these unassuming animations have such power and where they can be used.

Let's start with a handful of numbers. Journalists at The New York Times analyzed at the end of 2015 the number of GIFs published on various services. They found that on Tumblr about 23 million such animations were posted every day, Facebook users exchanged an average of 5 million of them daily, and on Slack there were about 2 million such activities per month.

But that was more than a year ago. You can have a feeling bordering on certainty that today the numbers being "churned out" are even higher. Among other reasons, because GIFs have entered the world of marketing even more strongly. In other words, brand owners, even the biggest ones, have sensed a good deal in them.

Why? Because they turned out to be an effective way to grab the attention of potential customers, who are increasingly less willing to watch longer advertising films or study graphics. A GIF is much less burdensome to absorb, and besides - which is especially important - statistics show that it is much more often passed on. So its viral potential is greater. Surely each of us remembers a GIF that was copied almost everywhere. It simply spread across the internet like a plague. And that is exactly what advertisers want. Free distribution.

Moreover, one of the greatest advantages of GIFs is that they are much easier and cheaper to prepare than traditional video.

From hundreds to thousands of retweets

GIFs can of course be used to promote brands in all sorts of ways. The greatest room for maneuver is certainly in social media, where skillfully prepared animations can help spark activity among potential customers.

An example? Let's start with the Apennine Peninsula. The owners of the Italian pizza chain DiGiorno were not satisfied with their brand's popularity in social media. The agency they hired decided to focus on posts with GIFs. By bringing more life into them, it wanted to wink at customers who had clearly grown bored with the previous style of communication. The result? - The level of engagement increased enormously. Previously we recorded at most a few hundred retweets and likes, now we count them in thousands - Luke Oppliger, one of the campaign's authors, told adweek.com.

GIFs are also regularly prepared by giants such as Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and even General Electric. The most popular animations of these brands, as well as many others, can be viewed on one of the most popular GIF services, giphy.com. There is plenty to watch. There are even opinions that some GIFs are small works of art. There is something to that.

Properly thought-out GIFs of course contain elements of a "call to action," but we are not talking here about a jumping "buy now" button (although in newsletters that may work, but more on that later). In this convention, it is more about creatively engaging the recipient. It could be an interesting idea for presenting the effect of the service we are advertising on a "before and after" basis, or a short "do it yourself" tutorial. Because in those several dozen frames you really can tell a story. And certainly present a new product from our company.

As Giphy CEO Alex Chung once said, "if one image is worth a thousand words, and the average GIF has about sixty frames, then it can be a message of about 60,000 words, and that is already a medium-sized novella." That is of course a strong exaggeration, but it is true that the message can be quite broad.

Surprise them with your mailing

GIFs have undoubtedly transformed email marketing, and if anyone has resisted them until now, they should try it. If we want to test whether such a trick will catch on, it is worth sending the same emails on a trial basis in traditional form and with a short animation.

It works, as communications specialists at Dell found out, whose results after implementing a new mailing campaign were impressive. As the industry service clickz.com reported, the IT giant recorded a 42 percent increase in clicks on materials, a 103 percent increase in conversions, which in turn translated into a 109 percent increase in revenue. Not bad, right?

A GIF can indeed perfectly capture the attention of a newsletter recipient. And corporate employees are really tired of stiff emails in the style of "Dear Sir..." You can also play with the convention as much as you like. It is becoming increasingly popular, for example, to set an animation as a background for text, or to include one in which its character... themselves suggests where you should click (e.g. with eye movement). Similar examples can be multiplied. Everything depends on the author's creativity.

At one point, the opinion about the slow death of emails in marketing was becoming more and more common, but thanks to such tricks they are experiencing a renaissance.

Bring your company website and blog to life

Skillfully placing GIFs on a company website can work wonders. Internet users searching for the information they need sift through a huge number of sites, which is why it is said that you have literally 3-4 seconds to steal their attention. A well-thought-out animation will certainly catch their eye. However, remember not to overdo it, because reaching for GIFs too eagerly will make the page load longer.

GIFs are also worth using on blogs, where companies present their offer and the most interesting trends in the industry. An interesting GIF will be for the reader not only a breather from an sometimes quite long text, but above all will increase the chance that they will share it with other users. As we wrote earlier, a GIF, like few other formats online, has enormous viral potential.

Putting a GIF into a post on a company blog can also sometimes save a text. Let's not hide it, there are industries whose offer is really difficult to describe in accessible language. So maybe it is worth simply showing it? Like, for example, the aforementioned General Electric.

And here is a curiosity. Did you know that online you can even find diaries "written" with GIFs? Here is one such site - http://gifdiary.com/.

***

GIFs have already become part of pop culture, so their presence in marketing was a natural course of events. They are still treated as entertainment, they amuse us, they become internet hits, but increasingly they also inform, persuade people to buy a product, and help shape a brand's image. And it really works.

The material was prepared by the interactive agency Bloomnet, author of the blog "Chcę Na Wczoraj"