The new year is coming and if you are in the digital marketing industry, it’s time to ask yourself: “What is going to be the biggest digital marketing trend for 2017?"

2017 is going to be a year when GIF will celebrate its 30th anniversary. And according to predictions of some digital marketing experts, it’s also going to be a year when GIF will reach its highest potential in digital marketing industry.

What is GIF and what does it stand for?

GIF is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format and it was introduced back in 1987 by Steve Wilhite of CompuServe as a new way to present a moving image. It’s an image file, like a JPG or PNG, it doesn’t contain sound, but it can contain animation.

Usually created from parts of videos or multiple static images, animated GIFs have viral appeal, and thanks to Tumblr, have reached heightened popularity, especially in the United States in recent years. Back in 2012 word “GIF" was named the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year. They have become a part of internet culture as a commonplace in our digital lives, from news to sports highlights to daily philosophical and comic relief.

Facts And Stats About GIFs

Compared with photos, GIFs are more appealing and more effective in Social Media strategy and compared with videos, it takes less time to create them and they are cheaper and easier to make.

Currently, GIF type of the format is shared more than JPEG or PNG format, according to the stats from W3tech.

The entertainment value of GIFs is pretty obvious, but for the past years, brands have recognized its business value as well. Don’t be surprised if you start seeing more and more brands using GIFs as an essential part of their Social Media strategy because according to Reuters, more than 84 percent of communication in 2018 will be visual. It’s perfectly natural to see that GIFs are going te be a crucial digital marketing trend for 2017. The fact that people only remember 20 percent of the text they read without visuals is sending everyone a straightforward message – a visual power is more important than ever. And according to HubSpot, when people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10 percent of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65 percent of the information three days later.

For the past five years, Google Trends shows that the interest for GIFs has increased dynamically and it’s still rising.

According to Giphy’s CEO, Alex Chung, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but as “the average GIF contains sixty frames, then they’re capable of conveying 60,000 words – the same as the average novel."

Forbes recently announced that Giphy passes 100 million daily users who send 1 billion GIFs each day. Facebook Messenger, Slack, Twitter, Tinder and many more popular services all connect to Giphy’s library, which has its own search engine for tagging and surfacing specific types of GIF. You can find and share GIFs almost everywhere, including Instagram, Pinterest, Google Plus, LinkedIn and many more popular Social Media sites.

According to Giphy, back in 2015 were around 150 million original GIFs, and New York Times tried to collect the number of GIFs on the most popular social networks, numbering:

• 23 million GIFs are posted to Tumblr every day
• 5 million GIFs are exchanged on Facebook Messenger daily
• More than 2 million GIF interactions take place on Slack monthly

Today GIF viewers via Giphy watch more than 2 million hours of GIFs per day, and GIFs are seen by more than 100 million daily active users.

Still not convinced that GIFs are going to be the top Digital Marketing trend for 2017?

According to HubSpot, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on Social Media than other types of content, so it’s obvious why many famous brands use GIFs to interact with their followers. For example, NASA uses GIFs of satellite imagery and Coca-Colla and Disney have their own Tumblr blog which is full of their personal branded GIFs.

Giphy runs its own studio in Los Angeles for customers such as Converse, FOX, McDonald’s, Nike and Paramount.

Talking about Digital Marketing trend for 2017, GIFs are frequently used in e-mail campaigns because video in email is still not supported in every email client. Web-based email clients like Gmail or Yahoo will display GIFs, but desktop email clients like Outlook will not.

Dell saw impressive results from its first GIF-centered email campaign, as it measured:

• 6 percent increase in open rate
• 42 percent increase in click rate
• 103 percent increase in conversion rate
• 109 percent increase in revenue

Netflix has brought a whole new level of usage of GIFs by using them for an outdoor advertising campaign.

Where to find and how to create GIFs?

There are a lot of places available online where you can find or create GIFs.

I have made a curated list of the 17 most used websites and apps for finding and creating GIFs:

If you are familiar with Photoshop you can easily create GIFs by using this software, and Creative Techs has made a great article on how to do it. You can find their tutorial here.

Do you have something to add? Please, feel free to leave a comment. Thank you!

GIFs source: Giphy

To be continued…