Over a decade ago, emojis made their grand entrance into the online world, revolutionizing communication. These small images and pictograms have become an integral part of social media posts, instant messaging conversations, blog articles, and overall marketing strategies. They bring color and vibrancy to digital interactions, encouraging action and eliciting emotions and associations.
Emojis catch and retain almost any audience, get rid of communicative misunderstandings, make communication lively and engaging. Let’s find out if popular emojis interfere with or help marketers and explore its impact on modern marketing strategies.
Emojis are an integral part of online culture
The first characters appeared on Japanese mobile phones and gained popularity in the early 90s. It has become easier for users to “pack” thoughts and impressions into a concise image of 12 x 12 pixels than to write long sentences. In 2010, Unicode translated images into code, and every user got access to them. The first collection of emojis can be seen at Apple based on iOS 6 in the hidden iPhone keyboard.
Emojis really raise statistics. Their appearance provokes:
According to surveys, today 59% of companies around the world use emoticons in tweets, and 40% include them in Facebook posts. Every day, about 10 billion emojis travel across the network: in correspondence, posts and comments. It is expected that by the end of 2023, the number of such symbols will approach the 3500 mark.
Emoji marketing shortens the distance between brand and customer
Advertising posts with emoticons attract the attention of readers and increase engagement rates at times. What are the goals of emoji marketing?
1. Establishes an emotional connection, helps brands visually convey feelings from a product or service, increases customer loyalty;
2. Introduces a universal language that is understandable regardless of cultural and linguistic differences, becomes useful in working with an international audience;
3. Creates eye-catching visuals to stand out from the competition;
4. Promotes brevity of thought, which is especially true for social media like Twitter with a limited number of characters;
5. Keeps you on trends, improves brand image in advertising and promotional campaigns.
Social media emojis & more
Facebook, Linkedln, Instagram and other social media are used for informal, friendly communication, so emojis are more common here than usual. For example, on July 4, a post was created on Twitter by Bud Light in the form of a graphic flag of the United States. The attribute consisted of fireworks instead of stars, American flags and a drink instead of red and white stripes.
But NASCAR timed the post on Twitter to coincide with World Emoji Day and created a photographic mosaic. Portraits of the most famous racers consisted of hundreds of emojis, from which it was impossible to take your eyes off.
Emoticons in apps
Domino’s Pizza managed to reduce the time to order food to five seconds with the help of emojis. The client can order pizza in the branded application using the chatbot function. After sending an emoticon with the image of a slice of pizza, you can immediately expect delivery.
E-mail newsletter
In email marketing, the chance of reading emails increases by 30% if they contain emojis. This feature is often included in the subject line, sender name or preheader of online stores, e-commerce companies. More “serious” niches are not inferior to them: banks, travel agencies, training centers, b2b companies, conference organizers.
The main rule is to select emojis in accordance with the topic of the newsletter.
Use in emoji marketing
In emoji marketing, the following are widely used:
Branded symbols, the purpose of which is to attract the attention of potential customers in social media. For example, Burger King does this in a very ironic way.
Content projects and emojis with the aim of enlightening society, drawing attention to problems. For example, the #EmojiScience project from General Electric talks about chemical, physical phenomena/problems in the format of cognitive experiments.
Meta tags with emojis. Symbols in the description, title make the presentation of the site in the search results more attractive, better reveal the essence of the description, increase CTR.
Emoticons in advertising campaigns. It’s important not to overdo it with creativity: if we are talking about a wedding agency, an icon with a cake is enough, if it’s about a tour operator, then emojis with a suitcase or an airplane are suitable.
Evoking emotions from advertising
Before experimenting with the trend and introducing emojis into the strategy of an advertising campaign, it is important to find out whether the chosen symbol coincides with the type of perception of customer information, their expectations, and whether it improves feedback from mailings?
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