A short while ago, I wrote about 10 brands using beautifully creative GIFs to enhance the visibility and quality of their content. Many of these well-established brands have a fully-fledged design department working behind the scenes to create the polished examples I identified. If you’re working in a smaller company or start-up, you may not have considered generating branded GIFs as part of your content marketing strategy.
At Festival of Marketing 2018, Rachel Zalta, Head of Research and Insights at Taboola, spoke about decoding the psychology of video and moving image within content marketing. According to Zalta, our brains process moving images 600,000 times faster, and find them six times easier to recall, compared to text-based content. It therefore comes as no surprise that brands big and small are trying to get in on the action.
Whilst it is always good to show your light-hearted side with GIFs and memes on social, it won’t necessarily make you stand out from the crowd if you just choose from what's out there. In fact, it's more likely you'll get lost among the millions of other users who have posted the same GIF in the last few seconds. Instead of attempting a tenuous link between a GIF of a flailing Kermit the frog and your latest product offering, why not tailor make one?
Whether it's down to lack of man-power or lack of creativity, you don’t need to be a design expert to be able to create simple, eye-catching GIFs that can add a new dimension to your social channels, website or email marketing campaigns. In this article, I'll be demonstrating how to make them.
NB as the title suggests, this will be a basic guide, focusing on the easiest techniques to help you get started in the world of GIF creation. Unfortunately, I won’t be teaching you how to create cute animated characters or anything like that.
We will cover:
- Text-only GIFs
- Creating GIFs with videos
- Stop-motion GIFs with photographs: Slideshows
- Stop-motion GIFs with photographs: Storytelling
- Other tips and useful links
Who’s excited to get started?