Cartoon Explainer VIdeos

Animated GIFs for Business

By December 9, 2015

Can Animated GIFs Boost Your Business?

Source: via GIPHY

Images are crucial to getting results for your Web marketing campaigns. They grab attention. They boost social engagement because they create more likes and shares.  They enhance your search engine optimization strategies because they are searchable. And they will inevitably convert your traffic into customers because they allow people to visually connect with products and services.

Maybe you have some well produced animated video you are using on YouTube or in email marketing and landing page strategies. The animated GIF is the perfect compliment to your Web marketing plans.

What the GIF?

Animated GIFs make your content stand out. They are a fun and relatively easy way to attract attention. Use them well and they could generate a boost in your revenue and response rate, which is exactly what happened to Dell and Lake Champlain Chocolates. Both brands used GIFs in their email campaigns; Dell saw an increase of 109 percent in its revenue while Lake Champlain received a 49 percent boost in response.

But what is an animated GIF? A GIF is a photograph or graphic made up of a short series of frames. It can be no longer than 5 seconds. It can play in a loop or be played a few times and then stopped. It is not a video, not a hyperlapsed video, not Flash, and not CSS animation.

How to Use It

Now you know what a GIF is (which, incidentally is pronounced as jif—yes, like the peanut butter brand). So how do you use GIFs to your advantage? How do you get the lucrative results that other brands, like Dell and Lake Champlain Chocolates, have achieved?



Here are just some of the things you can do to boost your business with GIFs.

  1. Make sure your GIFs can still work as a static image. Some email platforms like Outlook do not support GIFs
  2. Promote your other visually driven content on social media with GIFs. From recent videos on YouTube to animated infographics, you can take a portion of these pieces and create GIFs. It’s a more engaging way to promote your new content than to write a line or two on Twitter or Google+
  3. Use GIFs to show how your products or services work. A fast, graphical way to demonstrate how your products or services work will get more engagement
  4. Make your GIFs unique but still relevant. A lot of businesses use the powerful tool to reach out to customers. Your GIFs then need to stand out from the rest. But while originality and creativity are effective for getting results, make sure you do not stray too far from your message and your brand. If you have already produced a video marketing campaign be sure to ask your video production vendor if they can create a series of Gif’s as a teaser to an already strong marketing plan.



Stephen Conley

Stephen Conley


Leave a Reply