Think animations only belong on TV ads? You’re wrong. With newsfeeds continually saturated with images and advertising from brands, it takes something particularly engaging to stop your customer’s continuous scroll and take in everything you are trying to convey.

Instead of hard-sell posts, your followers are looking to be entertained; in short, they want more value from following you. This is where integrating animations into your social media strategy can make your posts far more memorable than those from your competitors.

  1. Animations are highly engaging

Simply, animations are fun and people like watching them! Animations are one of the few forms of media that actually make your followers stop and take notice because they are engaging, different and often a little bit quirky. The use of animations is not widespread within social media marketing and thus provides a point of differentiation between you and all the other pages your customers are following. By creating animations that focus on specific themes such as Christmas, Valentines Day or Mother’s Day you have the opportunity to pull on your customers heart strings in a way a single image just can’t do.

  1. They continue your brand message and tell your customers more

Animations are a fantastic way to show your customers how your product can be positioned in their lives to bring joy, luxury, convenience or whatever other emotion you’d like your product to bring. It is also another brilliant way for you to continue to present your brand message to your customers. Whether you want your customers to see your brand as fun, innovative or luxurious, it’s very easy to communicate this through an animation, however can take quite a bit of work to display through images alone. A great example is luxury online retailor Net-A-Porter’s Christmas animation showing the characters experiencing the perfect, luxurious Christmas, thanks to gifts delivered from Net-A-Porter. This was the perfect method to position their products as luxurious, decadent and the answer to a perfect Christmas. Could this have been done through an image? No. Could it have been completed with a real video? Sure (although animations are often viewed more often than real videos as people are more intrigued by them), but for thousands and thousands of dollars more…

http://animade.tv/work/mr-porter-gifts-all-wrapped-up

  1. They’re time & cost effective compared to videos

While you do need a professional with great skills to create quality animations, the cost of this is significantly lower than what it would cost to produce a full 30-second video with actors, makeup artists, videographers, directors and the rest. You can tell the same story, yet in a beautiful, eye catching way without the bank-breaking bill at the end, what more could you want? Well, if you’re looking for more, it’s also far more time efficient. An animation can be completed in a matter of days making it something you still have time to include in your upcoming Christmas social media campaign.

  1. Great for SEO and traffic

Animations are fantastically shareable pieces of marketing material that you can also use on your companies YouTube account thus helping to improve your SEO rankings. With animations coming up in your Google searches, it is a perfect opportunity to show new customers exactly what you’re all about.

Reports show that search results that include a video have a 41%* higher click-through rate than plain text and having a video on your landing page increases conversion by 70%. Videos are also shared around 12,000 times more than links and text posts on social media and people spend 100% more time on webpages with videos. 

  1. Opportunity to stand out over competitors – memorable

Finally, and probably most importantly, animations make your brand memorable! Animations stimulate both sides of the brain resulting in viewers retaining 58% more information from animations than they do from images or text. Animations are shown to ignite emotions in the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain then turns these emotions into images. This ensures a long lasting impression is left on your viewers after seeing your animation!

*Statistics sourced from Workbrands.