A new season signals a time for fresh impetus in your content – adding movement through gifographics and parallax effects is one way to make it stand out from the crowd
The official end of summer is signalled by a number of clear signs – clothes shops display their winter coats in windows and TV channels bring out their big guns as people retreat indoors.
For consumer content marketers, the temptation is to leap on seasonal trends by inserting SEO-friendly phrases like ‘…tips for Christmas’ or ‘spooky Halloween ideas’. And while there is a certain logic in aiming to be up to date and garner a few extra clicks, this can only take you so far.
Where the changing of the seasons can truly inspire you is in the new approach you can bring to your content.
A picture paints a thousand words
By this point, it’s old news that video is the growing force online. An estimated 69% of all web traffic will be directed at video content by 2017. Other figures show that we remember 80% of what we see, compared with 30% of what we read.
But for all the possibilities held by video, there are drawbacks for content marketers looking to produce fast, current content. It is time consuming to produce good quality video content, and can be expensive too.
One way of adding a sense of movement to your content is through gifs. Graphic Interchange Format files may have been around since 1987, but they have really taken off in the last few years through their easy shareability on social media.
But where gifs suffer, especially for B2B content, is in their brevity.
Gifographics are one solution. Combining the informal liveliness of a gif with the info-heavy engagement of infographics, gifographics can help bring your content to life.
This graphic from the Content Marketing Institute explains some of the pros and cons of infographics versus gifographics. Both gain credit for being memorable and shareable while gifographics win points for their entertainment and attention-grabbing value.
Moving pictures
Another way of adding that sense of motion to content is through utilising the parallax effect.
The effect involves the background of an image moving at a slower rate to the foreground. This adds a depth to the image and an element of 3D to the content.
When scrolling down on a parallax website, it can add a truly effective fluidity to the content.
One particularly impressive example is the NASA Prospect website. Five students and their teacher designed the site – creating an interactive story of planet prospectors, left behind by NASA to recover golden objects scattered across the solar system.
The site works so well thanks to its imagination, relative simplicity and the beauty of its design. It gained plenty of plaudits, winning a CSS Design Award along the way.
Of course, when it comes to using gifs, gifographics or the parallax effect, overuse is to be avoided. But, as the seasons change, it’s a prime moment to add a new dimension to your content.
And, like the autumn breeze blowing the reddening leaves off the trees, a little movement can go a long way.
