Long Life to GEO

Wait, what is that? Did I sleep during the Digital Marketing 101 class?

You might have heard about it but probably not during your lectures. GEO stands for GIF Engine Optimization and it could quickly become a must-have skill for all marketers. But let’s have a step back… What is a GIF?

I can start telling you about the whole boring story that goes like “GIF means Graphics Interchange Format and it was created back in 1987 in order to compress images and animation and to transfer them more easily”… but I won’t, right? You just need to know that, as of today, they are ‘animated images’ that communicate emotions, jokes or other messages. People use tons of these images each day through social media, messaging apps, etc.

GIPHY and Tenor are the most famous GIF search engines and, like all other search engines, they want their customers to be satisfied with the best results in the shortest amount of time. So, similarly to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), with GEO you can improve the organic ranking of you GIFs and make them more discoverable. If you wonder why you should do this, just consider that GIPHY could be the second biggest search engine in the world (at least according to its founder), serving 10 billion images per day.

That’s why brands should capitalize on this opportunity, starting with the creation of their own content and then applying GEO like a mantra: explore GIF search engines - create content with right keywords - optimize, and again. Take for example what Brad Michelson, eToro U.S. senior marketing manager, told Marketing Brew. He started to create and upload some eToro branded GIFs. However, after gaining some GEO knowledge, Brad created a famous eToro Bitcoin GIF that went viral and reached 15 million views in a few weeks. In total, eToro gained 165 million views with 133 GIFs and with a really limited budget.

Now don’t blame me if the cost per impression for GIFs will skyrocket.