Have you ever “LOL’d” someone in person?
Back in my agency days, I had a coworker, let’s call her “Bubbles,” who would use text acronyms during client calls.
“Oh your website has just been hacked? LOL. I guess I’ll TTYL. Good Luck!”
I’m not sure how the clients felt about it but I found it just a bit odd and a tad unprofessional. However, the growing Emoji marketing trend probably has “Bubbles” jumping up and down with glee.
Not only is the use of Emojis gaining popularity on a variety of channels, it is also reducing the use of Internet slang.
So how is it being used in marketing campaigns? Here are three key areas:
Emojis are being used on a variety of social media channels and have been used prominently in some recent Twitter campaigns.
The social media campaign for the newest Star Wars film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, is one example of using emojis to promote a product. Disney and Lucasfilm worked with Twitter to produce a number of Star Wars emojis, which included characters like C-3PO, stormtroopers and BB8 droids.
Domino’s Pizza has also used emojis as a promotional tool on Twitter and managed to draw a good deal of attention with their campaign. They sent out a sent out a number of tweets over the course of a single day that consisted of pizza emojis that were punctuated like regular sentences.
Once they had garnered the attention of enough confused followers, they revealed that their customers would soon be able to order pizza via twitter.
Twitter has been a major channel for emoji marketing in recent months and has even opened up their emoji collection for public use: Twemoji.
Marketers have had the option to use emojis within the content of their emails for a while now. Whether or not they choose to do this depends on their personal taste and they type of subscribers they are attempting to reach.
A newer opportunity for email marketing with emojis involves the campaign subject line. Mail Chimp is one email marketing service provider that now offers this feature.
The compact nature of emojis may be useful for conveying messages in shorter sentences and connecting with mobile customers. They also offer a way to infuse emails with a sense of fun and more emotional triggers.
Brands are incorporating emojis into their mobile marketing campaigns in several ways, which includes apps with customized emojis.
One of these brands is Oreo and they decided to incorporate emojis into a spring campaign created for parents in Mainland China. The app is designed to allow users to take pictures of themselves along with their children and then paste their heads into a variety of emojis.
Another brand that is using emojis to drive mobile engagement is Foot Locker. They joined this trend by creating their “shoemoji” app. Within this app, users are able to craft text messages paired with any of the 80 shoe mojis available.
Despite the growing popularity of using emojis for online marketing channels, it would seem that Google is not a fan. They demonstrated this by wiping out emojis from their search results (sorry Bubbles).
Are you for or against using emojis in marketing campaigns?
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