GIFs. They’re snack size pieces of kickass awesomeness that bring a little visual humor to your audience.

Oh, you don’t use them? You think they’re cheesy, pointless or unprofessional? Here’s what we have to say about that…

Well we didn’t really have to say anything at all, because the Panda proved our point.  The right GIF can convey our response to your lack of GIF love waaaay better and much more dramatically than a simple sentence ever could. That’s part of what makes GIFs so amazing!

If you haven’t started using GIFs yet don’t worry, we still like you, even if the giant Panda doesn’t.  But, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try our damnedest to change your mind!

Here at Amplomedia, we love GIFs…maybe a little too much. One look at our Twitter feed and you’ll likely think we have a small obsession – and we have good reason for it!

• According to @TwitterSmallBiz: [bctt tweet=”Tweets with rich media get +313% higher engagement and +52% more retweets” username=”Amplomedia”]
• According to nysae, [bctt tweet=”Posts with images have a 98% higher comment rate” username=”Amplomedia”]

An impressive number of companies are embracing these statistics and have started incorporating GIFs as a regular part of their marketing strategies. Like these ones, for example:

Netflix

Netflix recently added this GIF to their email blast about the release of the newest season of their original series, House of Cards:

Imagine opening up a seemingly regular email and finding a sneak peak of the show you’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of. You’d be completely surprised, happy and dying for more (all of which this author can personally attest to)!

Netflix saw an opportunity to not only release a very important tidbit of information (the season release date) but build anticipation and generate buzz among their fans at the same time.

Forever 21

Forever 21 grabbed an opportunity to connect with their audience on social media, leverage an influencer, promote an upcoming sale and add a little humor with this single tweet:

Up to 40% OFF beach essentials! Swim, jewelry, beauty & more! ☀👙💛 Shop it here: https://t.co/cvfuIx5Ygh💛 pic.twitter.com/xqisnd3N9P

— Forever 21 (@Forever21) June 24, 2014

Remember that stat above from @TwitterSmallBiz? Well, with 94 retweets and 297 favorites I’d say Forever 21 proved exactly how much more engaging and shareable content is when it includes rich media.

Amplomedia

Naturally we had to include ourselves in here as we are huge advocates of incorporating GIFs (obviously!). Like Netflix, we saw an opportunity to add a little visual flair to our everyday emails by incorporating a GIF of our logo animation into our signature line. By hyperlinking the GIF to our website URL we created an engaging and interactive call-to-action for our readers.

Whether you add a GIF into the body of your email to help convey a message or add it into your signature line like we did, there’s always room for GIFs in email!

A Few Things to Remember…

We hope we’ve convinced you to try incorporating GIFs into your marketing strategy but before you get down to business adding GIFs to your content, there’s a few things to remember:

• Strategy: using GIFs to leverage your marketing strategy is great, but don’t forget the strategy part. Ask yourself what your main objective is. Is it brand awareness, product or event promotion, or generating website traffic? Only after you’ve identified your answer can you then select/create your GIFs to align with your overall goal.
• Design: any GIF you use must remain consistent with your corporate persona and branding. Determine whether you have the skills to create your own set of GIFs in-house or consider hiring an external GIF-making pro to create a set of GIFs that fit with your brand and can potentially be used multiple times.
• Monitoring: like any other marketing tactic you should develop metrics to measure the effectiveness of your GIFs. Are they generating traffic to your website? Are you noticing increased engagement and shares? We’re confident that a well thought out and well produced set of GIFs will help achieve your goals but wouldn’t you rather have stats to back that up?!

Now it’s time to get to work creating those GIFs! Let us know if you’d like to incorporate GIFs into your marketing efforts!