NATIONAL TRUST: CREATING STAND-ALONE ASSETS ON GIPHY TO SUPPORT EDITORIAL CONTENT
WHAT NOW?
The National Trust are a national institution in which we trust. Generations have done so for some time. Recent figures suggest memberships are at an all time high and spanning generations, meaning even snowflakes like to see old properties covered in snowflakes.
One of the things the National Trust has done well for some years now is social media and it has long been doing content right. For me, the children’s collectible poster and magazine was a hotly anticipated mail drop before I even knew what Direct Mail was.
Now the National Trust are getting into the animated sticker game on Giphy. It shows that their visual assets need not be stuck at stunning photography of landmarks and locations. The sticker set includes a membership card, the 2019 handbook and with half an eye on integrating into other content channels, a ‘swipe up’ animation.
Expect to see the stickers — hosted on the National Trust Giphy channel — deployed in organic Instagram Stories in the coming weeks and I am sure they will be hoping that the general public — members or otherwise — will start to adopt them in their channels as part of a visit experience also.
WHERE NEXT?
The National Trust has a wealth of property assets which lend themselves to visual media and visitors are encouraged to capture as part of compelling user-generated content opportunities. By enriching this photography with stickers and adapting Stories on Instagram and Snapchat, they have a chance to reach out further and on the terms and in the animated visual language of those that inhabit those platforms.
It would be great to see them take their Stories content further and bring them to life with a wider range of supporting sticker animations, including making sticker sets a mandatory element of any influencer take-overs, sharing their visit experience and incorporating these animated branded elements to enhance brand exposure and consumer resonance.
As for Giphy as a platform itself, beyond hosting, it is yet to find its place beyond that space of being a well-indexed and searchable moving image library and with conjecture suggesting it gets down-graded in Google search, it offers little inherent SEO benefit but as a means to enhance a content experience, it certainly offers that much.
Client: National Trust
In-house: National Trust
This article first appeared on Content +Alt + Delete, a weekly content marketing bulletin.
