We’ve all seen animated gifs on Buzzfeed or Upworthy. Gifs can be fun and cool, but did you know that gifs can also amplify your campaign and Internet presence? Gifs carry emotional power on par with HQ images, and can carry a CTA effectively and unobtrusively.
 

Gifs bring together the best of images -- allowing people to engage quickly -- and video -- providing additional information with movement and expression.

Gifs can provide quick comic relief, inspiration, laughter…  
 

In email marketing, gifs have proven to get a 12% higher ROI than emails without animated images.

But before you get started, take a moment to review our blog on Creative Commons and re-using Internet images, and make sure you are sourcing them legally. For pre-made gifs, we love Giphy - and to make your own? Well, it’s simple.

One easy to use tool is Instagiffer. After you’ve downloaded the tool, all you need to do is input the Youtube URL of the video or upload the file you would like to make into a gif. Sliding the smoothness to the left or right increases or decreases the frames per second (fps), meaning that the less frames there are the less the gif will flow, but also the smaller the file will be. You can also crop a selection of a video frame that you would like to use and add in captions.

Select the start time of your gif based on the minutes and seconds of the original video. Then select your length in seconds. A successful gif typically won’t be over 10 seconds - the point is to quickly and effectively convey a message.

An additional way to make sure your message is understood is to add in text captioning on the bottom of the gif.
 

Add in text and make sure you have enough outline thickness, color contrast, and of course, that the start and end frames for the captions do not overlap (if you’ve ended a caption at frame 14, the next one would begin at 15, for instance, not 14).

And voila! You have a gif.

If you’ve applied our lesson on creating gifs in your blog or website, share a link with us, because we’d love to see them!