Getting started with Emoji Marketing

Face this.

1. Millennials are the most educated generation since the advent of human race.
2. Millennials will rather resort to cave-painting like visual communication rather than read through a proper sentence.

Sounds like an irony, right? It’s not one though.

According to the Cassandra Report, which is published by the agency Deep Focus, four in 10 millennials said they would rather communicate with pictures than with words.

That’s almost half of history’s most educated generation!

And to be honest it’s not just millennials, emojis are actually the preferred communication tool across demographics.

Take a look at this InfoG from Adweek to get a comprehensive picture

http://www.adweek.com/files/imagecache/node-detail/emoji-usage-01-2015.jpg

But we are not a bit shocked. The last few years have shown us clear as day that visual content is our nirvana, no matter the media you are using, and if we have to talk specifically about the very popular social media platforms, more than 63% of them are just images; that makes you realize the kind of power that visual content is wielding now.

Out of all visual trends, there’s one that no doubt stands out… it’s the rise of the Emojis.

What are Emojis?

The world was relatively unknown to the allure of Emojis till 2011. They were created in the 1990s by a Japanese communications firm, who made them to be evolved versions of typographic representations of facial emotions. It’s was not till 2011, when Apple decided to include a emoji keyboard in iOS 5 that the world lost its mind.  

According to Swyft Media, some 41.5 billion messages and 6 billion emojis are sent around the world every day on mobile messaging apps. Hell, emojis are even the fastest growing language in UK.

So you love them or hate them, you cannot dare to ignore them.

How can emojis be integrated into branded communications?

It was a popular notion in the market that emojis are just for millennials, and are mildly irritating for the older generation when incorporated in serious conversations but then research and survey obviously busted those myths long back.

Naturally all prominent brands were fast to join the bandwagon and started speaking the emoji language. But then not everyone passed the test. We will talk in detail about what kind of emoji campaigns brands pulled from their hat, and who all made a mark in a later blog post. Right now let us concentrate on a few pointers that you should keep in mind if you are looking to up your emoji marketing game anytime soon.

#1

Take it easy and slow

You might have just come across data and resources that make you feel very excited to try out emojis with your brand communication… but hey you got to slow down. You first need to do things like, tap on the kind of places where emojis will go best with your communication, make a calendar to make sure that you are not doing it too frequently etc.

If you start flooding your audience with emojis one fine day all of a sudden, it will look like you are trying too hard.

#2

Keep it relevant

Like everything else in marketing, with emojis too, you must stay relevant; and to be fair figuring out what will go best into your communication, at least as far as emojis are concerned is not that difficult. For best results, combine your gut feeling and natural observation skills with data driven decisions, and you are sure to come out as a winner!

#3

Target correctly

If you look into the InfoG again, you will realize that there is still a subset of the population that finds usage of emojis trivial and childish. You can’t just ignore those people right? So what do you do? Simple, you avoid sending them to people who don’t like them. Like in case of all other visual content, use multivariate testing in this case as well to find out what’s working with which kind of audience.

Emojis are simple things that we use almost every hour of every day. But the correct use of emojis in marketing communication is neither an exact science, nor a work of art, it falls somewhere in between.

In the next few blogs, we will explore this concept in further detail, but we suggest you talk to us personally about your business and how you can use emojis the right way to leverage your goals. Let us help you decode this fun and interesting way of edging past your competitors. Talk to us now at http://www.capitalnumbers.com/contact_us.php