For some, using emoji in their marketing strategy will make their toes curl in their shoes and the hair on their arms stand on end. But integrating emoji into your marketing campaign doesn’t have to be cringe-worthy or unprofessional.
Our marketing team have put their heads together to develop our top tips for the best ways of using emoji in your social media marketing campaign.
1. Should you use emoji in your marketing?
Depending on your industry sector, you might find that using emoji is second nature and fits seamlessly into how your target audience expects your brand to act online. But there can be times when using emoji to convey your message is seen as poor taste or unprofessional. For example, imagine looking for a serious service online, such as a bank or financial services, and finding a company that uses money bags (💰) or dollar faces (🤑) to tell you about their services or if you are looking for a funeral service to find them posting crying faces (😢) or small coffin emojis (⚰️).
When you think about using them in your post (particularly if you offer serious services), ask yourself should I use an emoji here? Or is there a way that I could make my message come across as more trustworthy but still approachable?
2. Don’t overuse them
Once you’ve started using emoji in your social posts, you need to carefully toe the line and ensure that you don’t begin to overuse them in your marketing.
Using too many emoji can also make your copy look forced and irritating to read, and hard understand what you are saying.
3. Make sure you understand them!
Emoji have a language all of their own. Sometimes, seemingly simple icons can have multiple meanings. Such as the peach emoji (🍑), which could mean fitness, fruit, butt, peachy and many more.
Where you might be posting it innocently, it could be interpreted as something else entirely! Not knowing the various meanings of the emojis could make your business come across as out of touch or inappropriate.
It’s easy to find out the meanings of different emoji; if you aren’t sure, Emojipedia will save you the embarrassment of picking the wrong one that has a double meaning.
4. Use emoji to enhance your social media marketing, not confuse it
Emoji can be a powerful marketing tool for engaging with your audience. For example, after picking out the perfect emoji for your post, you can use them to break up large blocks of text.
With this in mind, you can use emoji to grab users’ attention at the start of your marketing post or use them to highlight where a link is in your post that you want them to click.
It’s important that you don’t replace words with emojis. This can cause confusion for anyone trying to read it, as they might not understand what the emoji means. Instead, it’s best to think, ‘how can I use this to highlight my copy and make it attractive to readers?’
5. Don’t force it
You should think of emoji as an extension of how you would normally talk. So, the amount of emojicons you use shouldn’t come across as forced – or that you’ve added an emoji for the sake of it.
Think of how you would add emotion to what you are saying. For example, if you are happy, you’d smile. Emojis will help you translate this into text and give your post more personality. This shouldn’t feel forced, so only add in an emoji where it’s necessary.
Need a hand getting to grips with your social media and content marketing strategy? Get in touch with one of the Formation team today and see how our experts can catapult your brand to the next level.
