Gifs are the talk of the town these days; fact-check, the talk of the town for years. Though, the first gif was published in 1987; it has come to be a popular medium of expression since it has been started being used on social media, which certainly gave a massive push to its use. Today, you will find use of gifs all across the internet; right from personal chats to advertising campaigns, it has become an extremely popular method of communication. It is said that ‘an image is worth a thousand words’. It only makes sense if a few images are used in continuity to attract people. There are multiple ways a gif can be used; even though the uses may vary right from entertainment to educational.
Here are a few places gifs can be used and ways to use them:
- Advertisement- Companies like Nike and Nintendo have the used the effect of GIFs very successfully in recent years. It has been proved than visual communication is 20% more effective than textual ones. There is no doubt how well they can be used in the advertising strategy of a company. Many of these companies have social media accounts which they use efficiently to pull off online marketing campaigns. If you have to survive as a company, you must have an account on social media to employ all the marketing channels that are available in this day and age. In a recent report, it was published that 84% of media will be visual in the years to come. Seeing this, every company out there is looking to use interactive visuals as a form of advertisement. Companies like OnlineAssignmentWriting use these type of gifs when promoting their services
The times are such that companies know the value of gifs, especially when they have a younger audience to connect with.
- Email Marketing- Companies realized that they were doing it all wrong. They used to send out frequent emails to their customers in hope to connecting with them. Most of these emails were left unread and only a few loyal customers responded to them. They soon realized that people weren’t as responsive as before. As trends change, so do people. In this digital age, everyone is hungry for something new. Internet is like a restaurant who constantly keeps on serving new dishes making the people hoping for something new. Monica from BestOnlineAssignmentHelp says, “Right from the starting, we used to send out regular emails to our clients and got frequent response from them. The response rate dropped down a lot after 6 months. After investigating into it, we found that our customers were irritated with the frequent emails. We could not even get potential customers to have a look into our emails. Soon after, we realized what we were doing wrong; we were executing an approach that was too boring. We started using interactive images in our emails and were surprised to see that the interest levels spiked soon after.”
- Getting Users to Be Loyal- When you are updating the social media page very frequently with interesting content. It will make people surf your webpage again and again. They will do so on a regular basis if you maintain a certain standard and frequency. That is the tough part, and requires great creativity skills from your side. It allows you to make people interested by putting up content that is captivating. Small companies who are unable to market their products use this visual communication to level the playing field and give themselves a better chance at marketing their products. A company like TopAssignmentExperts regularly puts up content to attract their student customers, something along the lines of
They know that their customer base is a younger generation looking for help with their studies; so they put up content that they can relate to.
- Personal Form Of Communication- You will find people communicating over personal chats and forums using gifs. The general feel is that it is an expressive form of communication which can be hilarious and deep at the same time. You will find people communicating on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Whatsapp using gifs; it makes a conversation visually stimulating and more fun to have. It isn’t anything new and is almost a trend now that is used by people all over social media. Right from an inclusive forum like Reddit to student forums like ThanksForTheHelp, it is an extremely popular method of expressing a feeling, emotion, intent, or an action.
- Getting The Message Ingrained- It has been proven that people remember only 20% of the text they see without an image. That tells us how important visual stimulation is when it comes to sending across a message. If we are using visual stimulation, there is a higher chance that the message will get ingrained. That is the need of the hour; each company is vying to gain the attention of other’s company. It only makes sense that you go down the same path to send a visual message across the internet. For example, companies like PaperDoers send out gifs on their customer’s birthdays and on holidays to maintain a happy feeling with the company. It reminds the customer that the company cares about them and helps get the message ingrained in their head.
Promotion- This is the crux of the matter. It has come to be used heavily as a promotional tool. Why, you ask? It has come to show almost a 100% increase in conversion for companies who have started using gifs as a promotional tool. You will find that many student firms like EssayWriter4U, use gifs to make students understand basic concepts of various subjects. A brand like Coca Cola regularly comes up with gifs for its customers. They know that it is the demand of the hour to frequently engage your customer, no matter how. It helps to make the customers keep the name of your company in their head. It does not have to be an advertisement. It could be anything that the customer would find interesting or funny.