How to Promote Brands Through Gifs

Gif Search: How to Promote Brands Through Gifs

In a Tenor survey, two-thirds of millennials said gifs did a better job conveying emotions than text. It’s true. With gifs, brands can entertain and engage their target audiences in a way plain text or static images just can’t.

Just look at this gif:

In a few frames, it describes the gif/jif debate perfectly—this could take paragraphs in text.

How ow does this relate to marketing? How can you harness the power of gifs to boost your marketing strategy?

In this article, I’ll show you how you can find and use gifs throughout your marketing plan to increase engagement, make your brand relatable, and entertain your audience.

Find Gifs Through a Gif Search Engine

A gif search engine is a repository of gifs you can search by category, popularity, name, gif artist, and several other search parameters, much like an image site.

Typically, you type in a word, short phrase, or quote, and results appear from most to least popular.

This is where gif search engines may most greatly diverge from traditional ones: long-tail keywords may significantly limit your results.

Let’s say I want a celebratory gif, so I search for “celebrate.” This is what comes up:

Giphy—the example site above—is arguably the most popular gif search engine. In fact, Giphy is the second-largest search engine online.

(However, it’s not the only option. Other places to find gifs include Tenor, Tumblr, Reddit, and Imgur).

On Giphy, brands can create channels for their gifs, much like YouTube. Even the National Archives has a Giphy channel:

What Do People Use Gifs For?

Gifs are now used in place of emojis and text in everyday online conversations. Marketers can jump on this train to get our audience’s attention in their endless Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr feeds and engage with users across all of our marketing platforms.

Gifs have been around since 1987, long before internet use was widespread. It was a simple image of a commercial jet flying through a cloudy sky.

In the early days of the commercial internet, gifs were all over websites — spinning icons, under construction signs, flashing CTA buttons—and it was busy.

Then, gifs evolved into dancing everything—the peanut-butter-jelly banana, and, of course, the dancing baby; probably the first gif to attain pop-culture status.

Gifs can be so much more than a tool for humor, though. Marketers can harness their popularity to promote their brands in new ways. Gifs can be used in email marketing, social posts, and blogs—some blogs even create entire articles out of gifs!