Chinese Digital Marketing

Why You Must Use Emojis In Your Marketing Strategy

How And Why Do Emojis Add Value To Your Marketing Strategy?

Emojis are all over social media conversations because it’s true when they say ‘A picture speaks a thousand words’. In this case, it’s more of signatory language that codes conversations in a way that helps you as a brand relate to your consumers effectively!

The Emoji History

We as humans can trace the roots of emoji usage to the stone ages back to cave paintings, hieroglyphics and signages. Emojis in their truest forms are the pictographs of today, exchanged from phone to phone on a large scale.

Are Emojis Different From Emoticons?

Emoticons are basically punctuations, letters and numbers used to create pictorial icons that generally display an emotion or a sentiment. Emojis are a recent invention and were derived from 2 Japanese words where the “e” stands for “picture” and “moji” stands for “Character”. These emojis are graphical displays of faces, objects and symbols that can emote a variety of moods.

How Popular Are Emojis?

About 92% of the people use emojis and 30.4% use them several times a day

emoji marketing

Source: Adweek

If you’re still not convinced about the prominence of these little pictographs, then let us tell you that some of the biggest brands like Domino’s, McDonald’s, Diesel etc incorporated a complete emoji strategy in their campaigns

Domino’s decided to use emojis to offer its customers greater convenience to order pizzas. They introduced a chatbot features to allow customers to order using a single pizza emoji.

emoji marketing

How China’s Super app, WeChat Classifies Emojis

The app has 1 billion monthly active users that exchange 45 billion messages on a daily basis, with 410 million voice and video calls connected everyday.

Emoji Insights: WeChat disclosed user profiles for different age groups, revealing habits and lifestyles:

Users born after 2000 liked the Facepalm emoji best, which shows frustration or expresses bad luck. They were also late to bed, becoming active on the platform between 10pm and 12.30am. They love cold drinks and desserts as the number of people in this age group enjoying such treats more than doubled over the past year.

The favourite emoji of the post-1990s generation was the face with tears of joy. They generally wake up later and were the most frequent users of public transport – 25 times per month. This age group’s reading habits also have changed from preferring entertainment content to lifestyle and relationship articles.

Users born in the 1980s loved the Grin emoji and were fond of reading, and paid attention to national affairs.

Why Are Emojis So Popular?

Emojis elicit a stronger emotional response as compared to plain text because emojis make conversations relatable. They are a doorway into the hearts of readers and prospects. Marketers need to make a note of the responses resulting from content with emojis as opposed to plain text and compare the results. Establishing an emotional connection with your prospect, in the long run, is more important than just ‘closing a sales deal’.

How To Drive Engagement Using Emojis?

Emojis are the key to triggering massive engagement. To carry out a successful emoji business, the three elements that are drivers of massive engagement are:

Know Your Audience

If you are using emojis for cross-cultural marketing, you must understand the implications of the emojis in every culture. Some cultures are not very accepting of emojis and might prefer the use of text while some cultures overuse emojis

Study Your emojis

Before you employ the use of emojis in your strategy, you must understand that emojis are a language of their own. You must understand the rules of the emoji game in terms of the time and context of its usage.

Know Your Emoji Limits

The use of emojis just like text has limitations of its own. It can be used more casually on social media but when It comes to emails, it has to be used carefully in sync with the message.

Conclusion

Emojis are a simple and easy way to add personality to your marketing, advertising and official communications. It can help you spin an entire story and add zest to your marketing communications if used in the right tone and context. It is the pathway to humanize your brand on all communication platforms.

 

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