You’ve surely heard or seen an emoji on your travels around the internet, but how can you utilise these when marketing online?
Emojis were originally used for fun, but in more recent years have firmly placed themselves as a global language. Statistics from 2017 suggested that of the internet users worldwide, 92% of them regularly used emojis. Tracey Pickett at a Tedx event in Greenville (check out the 10 minute video below) stated that they are surely the most important advancement in human communications.
We use emojis in our social media posts, in direct messages, on WhatsApp, as stickers across posts on SnapChat. They’re so embedded in our lives, that in 2011 Apple created the emoji keyboard. But, are businesses using them to their full potential? What is that potential?
Let’s think a little here. We use them day to day in personal relations because emojis are in effect, much better at explaining our emotions than we are with words. Sometimes an emoji is just a more apt response than words, or you can place one at the end of a sentence to give it as a whole emotion. Sometimes all we need to send is an emoji, because it conveys what we need or want to say in one small image. At its core, emojis can bridge the gap between text and tone. An emoji adds human emotion and personality to a sentence.
So going back to the question are businesses using them to their full potential? No, not in our experience. We’ve written many blogs about how to market online for business, and they all focus on the fact that social media enables us to create relationships with our customers and potential customers. How do we do this? By being more human (and less corporate business), and adding personality in our marketing strategy.
If this is truly our aim, then we can’t ignore the use of emojis when marketing for businesses online.