Emojis have taken over a significant part of online communication, with people using them in order to express a feeling, a taste or an interest without using a long written description.
The term 'emoji' has become so popular that it was named by Oxford Dictionaries as Word of the Year for 2015, which means that we were not surprised when we noticed an increase of branded messages including emojis.
It's common for brands to attempt to be part of a trend, and some of them excel in it, but there's always the risk of trying too hard and in no relevant context.
The rise of emojis in branded messages
According to Socialbakers and its analysis of the top 500 brands, 59% of them included emojis in their tweets in 2015, while also 40% of them included them in their Facebook posts.
Image source: eMarketer
Appboy analysed the brands using its service and saw an increase of 777% on the use of emojis in branded campaigns from 2015 to 2016.
Meanwhile, 92% of the online population has used emojis at least once, which proves how the small symbols turned into the new internet slang.
Image source: Emogi
It's interesting to observe the reasons that people use emojis and it seems that it's not just about being fun and casual. In fact, people may use an emoji in order to improve online communication, to be understood, to add a sentiment, or simply to express themselves as fast as possible in the most appropriate way.
This becomes important for brands, as it may help them understand the motives behind the emoji use for their target audience and whether they should start adding them to their marketing messages.
Image source: Emogi
Should your brand use emojis?
Emojis may help a brand add a personal element to its marketing messages and create an additional appeal to its audience, but this doesn't mean that every case is similar.
Before you jump on the excessive use of emojis as a way to increase your relevance, you may need to consider:
- How does my target audience interact online?
- Would emojis enhance the branded message?
- Which emojis could be more relevant for my brand?
- Do I really know the meaning of the emojis I'm going to use?
- How often should I use them?
Thus, the use of emojis depends on:
- target audience
- relevance
- affinity
- frequency
and it may be adjusted depending on the set content strategy, or a particular campaign.
Moreover, there's also the case of using emojis in an email marketing campaign, which leads to further debate on whether they are adding value to your message.
Once your brand is ready to include emojis in its next campaign, you might need some inspiration on the best possible uses to do so. Or else, you may need to learn from other brands' mistakes on what to avoid.
Brands already doing excellent emoji work
Domino's
Domino's has created one of the most popular emoji-related campaigns when it asked for customers to order pizza by tweeting the relevant emoji. People had to sign up through the site to enable the option of ordering through Twitter and from that point, a simple tweet featuring the pizza emoji led to an instant order, which was confirmed through a direct message.
Thus, a simple symbol was easily incorporated in their sales funnel and the audience turned into customers in the most creative way.
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