Emojis - Brands Cannot Shy Away from The Latest Marketing Tool While emoji is the latest language that young millennial users understand, brands are yet to start talking in this language
By Mohd Wassem
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On an average users' spent more than 2 hours a day on social and messaging applications, sending billions and billions of messages per day. Only two platforms Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp process more than 60 billion messages a day. Recent researches show ninety two percent of the users use emojis seventy percent of the time. Three billions of them are shared every day on different platforms. The phenomenon is so strong that even giant like Facebook, which is credited with building social behavior on the Internet, had to change itself when it launched emojis on its platform. It is more convenient for users to communicate, in fact express. Adding emojis to the Facebook post can increase number of likes by fifty seven percent and comment and shares by thirty three percent.
Emoji is the latest language young Millennial Understand
When the biggest digital platform on earth had succumbed to the pressure of rising user expectations, how long could the marketing platforms, medium and marketers stay away? While emoji is the latest language that young millennial users understand, brands are yet to start talking in this language. It is high time marketers and brands speak this language. It is not that all brands are not using this language some have mastered the art and pushing it really hard.
Domino's let customers order pizza by tweeting a pizza slice emoji! Interesting isn't it? Next time do try ordering with emoji ;-). Taco Bell, filed a petition urging Unicode consortium, an organization that controls the coding standards of yellow emojis that you see on your keyboard, to include Taco Emoji. It also ran a campaign "America wants a taco emoji"
If you are a brand, here are five simple yet effective ways you can use emoticons in your marketing campaign
- Encourage your users to use emoticon while interacting with you; you can easily use this mode of communication if you happen to be in business of Coffee, Beer, Fruit, Restaurant, and Travel etc. These emojis are already available in all existing keyboards. Gradually you would become part of their personalized conversation. Just like Pizza emoji repeated enough number of times with Domino's would start representative Domino's in conversation.
- Work with complementing brands. Brands like Pizza, Soft Drinks, Coffee, Uber etc can work together to design very attractive emoji campaigns. A simple e.g get pizza deliver with Pepsi by Uber. Emoji of pizza, cold drink and car could be used.
- Design you campaign around Emoticons. Not all campaign could be designed around emoticon but you could always incorporate them during national events like republic day, independence day etc. National flags are part of standard emoticons in the keyboard.
- Work with third party platforms. Twitter allows brands to have sponsored emoticons, Line and Viber allow brands to have sponsored stickers, these can designed in way to represent emoticons and provided to users on their platforms. Brands could also partner with third party Keyboards like Bobble Keyboard to their brands incorporated in the content. Pepsi worked with twitter to include 50 custom branded stickers for #PepsiMoji campaign in 10 countries.
- Self promoted emoticon platforms: Starbucks have its own emoji's keyboard with all coffee emojis in it. Celebrity like Kim Kardashian, ad Justin Bieber have their own keyboards. Brands could have their own platforms with pre-populated emojis.
