Digital marketing is a practice
that has established itself as fundamental in most business marketing
strategies. Many tools have emerged for its implementation. The webinar is one
of those tools that called our attention. The webinar is an online conference,
animated by a company on a theme to attract potential customers, who subscribe
to it free of charge and can attend the live or the replay. The audience has
the opportunity to interact and exchange with organizer through through an
instant chat interface. Therefore, marketers can offer their audience a collaborative
digital experience, through a simple and attractive format, at very attractive
prices.
Cost
Efficient
Some companies have specialized
in the organization of webinars (Frenchweb, GotoMeeting, Webikeo for example)
and some offer their services to companies wishing to offer this experience to
their clients ... for free! If not, other webinar suppliers may require a fee,
but in return they offer more flexible features and technical support to avoid
encountering bugs and other problems that may arise during the online
conference. To reduce this cost, marketers can involve partners in their
webinar and in return split the fee. As for the audience, it does not have to
travel and therefore avoids transport costs while taking part in this
interactive digital experience.
Interactive
Experience
Indeed, the audience can
participate in the online conference by asking their questions instantly and interacting
with the speakers in the form of a sidebar comment box. This allows the
speakers to best adapt their speech to their audience and to demonstrate the
virtues of their product or service in an optimal way. The webinar is therefore
an effective digital marketing tool to convince and show their credibility.
Marketers can include videos and conquer their audience (the use of video
increases the product or service understanding by 74%), who are generally
interested in the theme covered by the company as they subscribed on their own
to the webinar. Most of the time, the webinar is leading to physical
"one-to-one" meetings with the most interested participants.
Prospects
Lead Generation
Webinar enables the audience to
have visual image of the speaker’s company, which raises brand awareness
and increase the customer base. This tool enables marketers to target prospects
on a large scale as subscriptions to the webinar are free, opened and
unlimited. Speakers can position themselves as leaders in their domain linked
to the webinar theme, discuss their audience pain points and then expose the
utility of their products to a large audience. The more engaging the webinar
is, the more participants could turn as brand ambassadors and spread the word
on the speaker’s products to their network.
In conclusion, the webinar is
emerging as an important marketing lever; it is an interesting tool to
legitimize the image of the company, acquire leads and retain customers through
an interactive, inexpensive experience. Some call the webinar the new
"eldorado" of marketing. In the United States, 82% of B2B companies
have already set up this practice, in France only 10% to 15% of companies have
used this tool, a percentage that will undoubtedly increase.
In
Digital Marketing, many tools have appeared since the last decade, if some of
these tools were complex there is one who suggest a particular interest from
the usual consumer to companies: the GIF. The technique isn’t new but with
emergence of social media, the gif has made itself a reputation: mostly being
attractive, easy to find and with a sense of humor very appreciated sometimes.
It follows and evolves with the now famous « emoji’s », and bring
something very special to the conversation not only for people when they are
chatting, but also for companies when they try to implement it in ad campaign
of in their communication in general.
1. Gens Y & X: second creator of the GIFs
The
GIF means « Graphic Interchange Format », created in 1987, which is a
surprise as it is very known now for less than 10 years. Here you can have a
great pictured history/timeline of the GIF.
His creator, Steve Wilhite has realized a way to do a specific kind of
animation, taking few images, without sound and played in loop mode. The GIF
hasn’t so popular as told before, indeed there was a time when using it in
conversations makes you tacky. This can explain because of the period, before
social networks explosion and in a fast paced evolving environment, which was
internet during the 90’s. Another aspect was the resource, display a gif back
in the days took way too long, now it demands less than a second to charge and
play the loop. Facing the overall evolution of the web and its design, the GIF,
poor of design and a getting older with no evolution, were cast aside.
Nowadays,
on Facebook Messenger, there are, for the most part, images from movies or TV
Shows. It exists two kinds of GIFs, the classic one and the one with a text
within, the « GIF caption ». Putting a few words on the expressions
produces often a funnier effect. The GIF is also appreciated for its easiness
to be transportable, because you can now easily charge them on your mobile
phone through the chat apps. It come close with the fact that typing become
more and more boring, especially on mobile phone and portable device, our
generation need to speak fast and express themselves more and more in a way
emotions are felt by the person who read the message.
According to Giphy’s CEO, Alex Chung, and the famous sentence: a picture may be worth a thousand words, and if you consider “the average
GIF contains sixty frames, then they’re capable of conveying 60,000
words »
Simon Gibson head of marketing and
acquisitions at Giphy said: « If you pull content from the culture,
and itis used to express
themselves, it opens a bigger variety of broader and abstract thoughts »
Speaking
of Giphy, this company, which has raised more than $23 million, is one of the
leader of the middle, both turned on web users and companies, as this first GIF
search engine has provided people a huge GIF library, very funny for the user,
and sometimes containing implicit advertisement for companies by generating
their brands into GIFs. The company Giphy has known a exponential success, they
actually registered that there was 95 millions of unique users per month in
2015. Moreover, Giphy announce there are currently around 150 million
original GIFs, while the NY Times tried to collect the
number of GIFs on the most popular social networks:
▪ 23 million GIFs are posted to Tumblr every day
▪ Five million GIFs are
exchanged on Facebook Messenger daily
▪ More than two million
GIF interactions take place on Slack monthly
The
best to sum up this part is what Maxime Antoine, creator of the company .GIF :
« Generation
Y was born with computers, we are the first consumer social networks and other
means of communications. As soon as it is possible to communicate differently,
more original way than the others, we do. The gif, between image and video,
enjoys an unlimited choice on canvas, (...). In animation, it summarizes what
would have taken many lines to write. It's fun and it fits well with the
generation Y, (...) who wants above all to have fun, share, have fun, do not
take the lead and, in this, the GIF is a good way of expression "
2. GIF for Business
GIF
are very used in companies’ content marketing. It shows to consumers and
potential targets that the firm is well settled in the actual Web culture and
that it understands the stakes and be able to communicate in every way to make
consumers feeling close of the company and the brand’s values. In digital
content marketing GIFs are a strong way to communicate, first because of the
fact the consumer’s eye is grabbed easier and that the repetition offers him to
not do anything except enjoying the GIF. The user can start seeing the GIF from
the middle of it, and miss anything, as it starts over few seconds later, and
again etc. Furthermore, it speaks the internet language, which sometimes is
something that you cannot reproduces is real people exchanges. Besides, it is
very easy to consume it and enhance easily brand’s messages from companies.
To
a financial aspect for them, GIFs are great, as they are more effective than
images and cheaper than a video. Companies like Riffsy and Giphy, said they
were not currently focused on making money from the animations, they are
working with brands on using clips to promote products. Moreover, the company
doesn’t risk to overcharge its website, the GIF is a light weight format,
unless you abuse of it on the same webpage. By the way, doing this would produce
the opposite of the requested effect: instead of attracting the consumer’s
attention, you would make consumers’ eyes run from the screen, as he would
escape all these « epileptic colors » and animations.
“Typing is an antiquated input method and you
can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,”
said Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, which is based in
Manhattan. “GIFs have trumped all of it.”. Besides you can add the fact that
the huge easiness to share the GIF is interesting for companies, who tries to
make them viral over the internet and social networks. They also use it in their
email campaigns to bring an innovation to the simple newsletter or promotion
you receive. On social media like twitter they create also GIF to react to
current events happening on today’s consumption society, it shows they are able
to react quickly and are close to the consumer by interacting with him easily.
Reuters
has said that some predict that 84% of communication will be visual by
2018, so any type of visual content that may help a brand find its
personality is more than welcome.
Examples:
The
movie Taken 3.One popularclip showed Mr. Neeson jumping out a window, on repeat, with the
subtitle “YOLO” — shorthand for “you only live once” — in blocky white
lettering.
Nintendo
announced its collaboration with Vans through Tumblr and this GIF was the
perfect way to summarize the announcement:
Netflix has created
an outdoor ad campaign entirely made with GIFs
Another
kind of business: the digital art, here is an example of a person who live with
his GIF creation: the Tumblr of A.L. Crego, it opens the question that the GIF can be
something else than a funny stuff you send to friends.
To
conclude, it exists a debate on the pronunciation of the word GIF. Some people
think it is a hard G because it means “Graphics”, but in an interview with the NY Times, Mr Wilhite said: “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both
pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of
story.
Update from November 1st : Giphy has been valuated for 600 millions of dollars. More details here.
