25 million people viewed the GIF I created to promote my company. Here’s how I did it in 1 hour and $0 budget.

The last time you searched for a GIF on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or even Slack, it was done through "GIPHY", the second-largest search engine in the world (according to the company's CEO). The global GIF market is dominated by just two large repositories: Tenor (acquired by Google in 2018) and GIPHY (acquired by Facebook in 2020), with the latter of the two holding the lion’s share.

Over 10 billion GIFs are sent every day via GIPHY, but few people realize that GIFs can significantly boost your company's exposure without spending any money.

Meet the new growth hack: GEO

I recently created a simple GIF and put the logo of the company I worked for (Jolt) in the corner. I then uploaded it to GIPHY, and by now my branded GIF was seen 25,000,000 times! WOW. See the image above.

I was riding on a new trend called GEO – short for GIF Engine Optimization – meaning an attempt to make it to the top search results with a brand-related GIF. Many refer to the field as "SEO’s little sister," and not for nothing: success in GEO can have a positive effect on brand awareness. That is, a GIF can quite effortlessly draw many eyes to a company’s logo or product.

Here is a guide to everything you need to know about leveraging GIPHY for your own marketing purposes.

A full guide to your first steps with GIFs

Step 1: Create a business account on GIPHY

You will need a business account because only GIFs of businesses appear in the search results on Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. It's easy: open a regular account with a company domain email (not @gmail.com), post 5 GIFs of your choice and then apply for a business account through this link (when you are signed in). It is important to note that one company can open more than one business account, using different email addresses. This is a point worth noting – we shall return to it later.

Step 2: Wait for approval

This usually does not take longer than a couple of days. In the meantime, make sure that the GIPHY profile page has a link to the company's home page; if possible, also include a UTM to measure the sessions that came from there (that said, don't count on some insane traffic from the profile page).

Step 3: Choose a topic

Once you are recognized as a business user, the GIFs will be indexed by the search engine, and you can start uploading to no end. Exactly what kind of GIFs should you create and publish?

To choose a topic for your GIF, I recommend checking out the total views on GIPHY and the number of results. If there are 100> results and 100M> views in total, you are likely to have a very hard time making it to the top because many are scrambling to get there. If it's less, that’s better – it means you've found a smaller niche to take over and don’t have to squeeze into a crowded market.

Step 4: Design the GIF

The graphics themselves can include a mini-guide to using the product, the result of using the product, a metaphor for the success we provide for customers, animated information, or just about anything else. You can of course embed a logo to the corner of the GIF. I also suggest creating some GIFs with no background, which can serve as stickers in Instagram stories.

It is important to remember that if the GIF is not good, there is nothing that can promote it to the top. The basis for every GEO is a great GIF. I recommend working with a relatively wide range of colors and minimizing the text on the GIF as much as possible.

You can easily create GIFs with Canva.

Step 5: Tagging, tagging, tagging

When publishing a GIF, attach to it up to 20 tags, which are what people will be looking for to get to it. It is important to understand that in most cases people are looking for GIFs to express an emotion, so the tags must focus on emotions and experiences. I suggest taking advantage of all 20 tags allowed and looking at the search results for all chosen tags in order to learn about the competitors (and about how to stand out from the crowd).

Step 6: Play the waiting game

Our GIFs are live - yay! Once published, the best practice is to simply wait. Even if a particular GIF barely gets exposure at first, it can erupt later, largely without taking any further action. It is therefore advisable to post branded GIFs as early as possible in order to reap the rewards down the road. I suggest measuring once in a while the number of views to predict trends.

Success is not guaranteed, but if you try again and again with enough GIFs and improve your tag game after measuring the performance of each GIF, at least one GIF will most likely break out and be exposed to millions. It is therefore important not to put all your eggs on one GIF, because there is no limit to the number of GIFs you can publish (and multiple publicity does not really hurt any single GIF’s probability of success).

Pro tip: Leverage psychology hacks for attention

GIFs are noisy products. When people are looking for a GIF, they are exposed to lots of moving pictures at the same time, each trying to grab their attention. So how do you beat the noise?

In my case, I used a trick that probably led to the immediate success of the GIF: earlier we mentioned that multiple business accounts could be created for the same company – so I posted the exact same GIF from different accounts. I posted the GIF with one account, then with another account, then with another account. This led to the fact that amidst all the noise of the search results, there was one GIF that popped up repeatedly and grabbed people’s attention.

The move is in line with a cognitive bias called the mere-exposure effect, which says: the more exposed, the more loved (up to a point, where said pattern is reversed). If the assumption is correct, then the initial exposure to the GIF results in viewers liking the next exposures more, as they continue to scroll.

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