It may come as a surprise, but brands across the world use animated GIFs in their marketing campaigns. From Nike to MailChimp, GIFs have made everyday marketing campaigns into noteworthy successes — and that’s led to not only better sales but also brand awareness.

Excited to blend your marketing strategy with animated GIFs? Keep reading for a step-by-step guide!

What the heck is an animated GIF?

While pronunciations may vary, Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is an animated image format with more than 30 years of history. The reason why GIFs appear animated is that they feature a series of image frames — they’re like a digital version of flipbooks.

If you browse for GIFs, you’ll often see GIFs converted from videos. In most cases, however, marketers create GIFs that feature static backdrops and a single animated element, such as an object, person, or text, to emphasize the movement in the GIF.

What do GIFs have to do with marketing?

Today, visual communication dominates — and that includes GIFs. In fact, Reuters estimates that more than 80 percent of communications in 2019 will qualify as visual. It shows too, with one of the world’s go-to hubs for GIFs, GIPHY, announcing that its users send one billion GIFs a day.

This tells marketers that people use GIFs daily, and for a variety of reasons, including:

• Highlighting a feeling
• Sharing a reaction
• Noting an event
• And more!

That’s one reason why businesses began experimenting with animated GIFs in marketing, which you can use in blog posts, emails, social media posts, and more. What they found was that animated GIFs work, whether you’re looking to encourage sales or engagement.