Have you ever asked yourself what is most engaging for everyday marketing strategy? Have you ever deliberate about how to optimize the use of videos and gifs in your everyday marketing tasks? 

No?

Well, there’s the door, show yourself out! 

To endure, get ready to take a deep plunge into the world of moving images, like videos and gifs, what they are, why we use them, and how we can employ them.

What are GIFs?

Gif is erect for ‘Graphics Interchange Format’ and essentially, it’s a looping animation/video consisting of a sequence of pictures or ‘frames’ if you want to know more of technical.

What’s the difference between videos and gifs?

The main difference between them is the file name. Animation GIFs are in demand on the web for adequate reason. They give more engagement than an ordinary image while remaining more digestible compared to a typical video. As mockingly simplistic as it sounds, the main way to tell a video apart from a gif is looking at the file format “.format” at the end of the file, a gif will have ‘.gif’ and a video file could have a range of names like ‘.mov’,’.mp4’, ‘.avi’ etc, but a gif will always be ‘.gif’.

Social media –

Well, On Instagram which is a wildly popular platform for consumers and companies alike. One motive the platform is so successful that is due to its visual nature. Not only are images and videos more engaging than written text, but visual content is remembered more than simple text.

So, Social media is the prime location for housing gifs and videos, but gifs and videos have different purposes on these sites. People tend to post videos that contain various types of content. And subject matter like TED talks, life hacks, bloopers, recipe videos, movie trailers, reality show clips, etc. These videos often give out a specific purpose, they tell a story or they always advertise something.  

As per the data of 2019 with over 2.07 billion monthly active users, and around 100 million hours of video watched every day on Facebook.

Many modern businesses understand the consequences of using a diverse range of content types on websites to keep users engaged. Visual content makes a huge impact/results on how people receive and perceive the messages you convey.

Some research shows that people remember 80 % of what they see versus 20 % of what they read.

Video content and animation content are powerful forms of visual media that are on the rise. People spend an average of 1.5 hrs each day watching video content, and 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. And HTML5 video element and HTML5 video players, video content is easier than ever to serve to website visitors.

Animated GIFs have also grown in popularity with the rise of visual content. These animated GIFs combine multiple images or “frames” in a single file to convey motion, and they are a highly visual yet cheaper alternative to video content.

On Website –

Ads are constantly competing for our attention online, and gifs and videos often act as a sort of megaphone to help the brands shout louder and gain our valuable attention. On many fashion retail e-commerce sites, they use videos on their site to showcase to the viewer how the clothing looks on the catwalk. This is extremely useful to the consumer as it shows them how they will look, how the fabric reacts to movement, is it fitter, and what the colors look like in a different sort of lighting, etc.

Some pros and cons of using video and animated GIFs on your website.

While Using Videos on Your Website

Pros

• Informative: Videos are ideal for demonstrating how things work
• Engagement is an important concept in the content marketing lexicon.
• Emotional: Easy medium for storytelling.
• Improves conversion rates: Most important for landing pages.

Cons

• Time-consuming: Creating high-quality video content is often extremely time-consuming. Most videos required extensive editing before publishing, which also takes a lot of time.
• Costly: Creating professional-grade videos for business purposes requires significant investment.

While Using Animated GIFs on Your Website

Pros

• Cost-effective: Animated GIFs are a much more cost-effective content format to create than video.
• Straightforward to make: Armed with some images and animation software, you can quickly get to work in creating attractive animations that enhance your other content.
• Effortless edit: Editing an animated GIF is possible and it is much easier than editing a video.

Cons

• Color limitations: The color palette for animated GIFs are limited to 256 colors, which can noticeably affect their quality and make them appear pixelated.
• Overheads: Websites tend to experience significant overhead in terms of page loading times. Such overheads can damage user engagement.
• Can emerge spammy: There is a good balance between the level of animated GIFs that complement your on-page content and the level that looks spammy. People tend to skip a blog post littered with GIFs because they become too distracting.