How to make your own animated GIFs (the easy way)
Bite sized and memorable, GIF videos make for great apartment marketing tools. That’s why we built this quick guide to explain how you can easily make these Internet-favorites for a variety of different purposes. Read on to learn about GIFs that are good for promotion, GIFs that are good for education, and GIFs that are good for just plain fun.
GIFs for Promoting Your Communities
Most apartment marketing material is extremely visual. Plenty of multifamily companies hire professional photographers to shoot photos of their communities. And more recently, it’s become common for properties to host virtual tours and other video materials on their websites.
While custom video content is good to have, longer videos are not without their faults. It’s hard to get people to watch these videos unless they’re already interested in the property, so they’re not the best for building new leads from scratch. Fortunately, apps like GIF Brewery or Recordit.co provide a solution.
GIF Brewery allows you to turn regular video files into GIFs. You can then use the condensed, easy-to-digest GIF files to cram as much visual information as you can into a relatively short amount of time. You could, for example, convert your 10 minute virtual tour into a rapid fire walk-through that shows all of your community’s amenities in less than five seconds. You could then promote that GIF via a paid social ad.
GIFs for Helping Your Current Renters
Keeping your renters happy helps to ensure low vacancy rates and a positive reputation. That’s why you should be doing all you can to offer your assistance with any technical difficulties a renter may have on your website. And if you hear about a particular technical issue from several different people, Recordit may be of some use.
Recordit is a screencast recording software that can also turn your screencasts into GIFs. This tool is particularly useful if your residences are having a hard time navigating certain processes on your website, such as making rent payments, and you want to create a video tutorial to show them how it works. Recordit is fairly easy to use and allows you to record your whole screen or just a small section of the screen.
GIFs for Fun
Although GIF Brewery and Recordit are great for making GIFs out of your own custom videos, sometimes you just want to create GIFs from videos that already exist. Sure, this type of GIF won’t really serve as an educational resource for current or prospective renters. But sometimes it’s just good to have a little bit of fun and show off the human side of your marketing efforts.
We us Giphy to find fun GIFs that fit any occasion, but Giphy also allows you to turn any Youtube video into a GIF. All you have to do is provide the URL to the Youtube video and choose a rate of frames per second. Any GIF you create through Giphy can be downloaded from the site.
Bonus: GIFs the Hard Way
While the three sites listed above are great for apartment marketers who want to step up their GIF game, they aren’t very flexible when you want to create something that’s truly custom. For an advanced look at how you can make your own GIFs, head over to Hubspot’s guide on how to make a GIF with photoshop.
(and as promised…a cat gif…with a special guest appearance)
