Emoji Marketing

11 / 17 / 15

4 min read

Table of Contents

Do you speak emoji? shutterstock_294472517

If you don’t, you might be finding yourself increasingly in the minority as emojis—defined by Google as “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc., in electronic communication”—gain momentum as a form of universal, nonverbal communication. These sometimes-silly little pictures are being embrace by more than just Millennials as a way to express feelings, moods, actions, and more in a way that transcends language boundaries.

A recent study by Emogi found that 92% of online consumers use emoji. The report found that people use emoji to help them be more accurately understood. It also looked at the connection between emoji and digital advertising.

Of course, researchers aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed emoji use on the rise. Social media platforms and even retail brands have found exciting new ways to leverage the popularity of emojis in 2015.

Brands That Embraced Emojis In 2015

Instagram allows emojis as hashtags. In April, Instagram released an app update that enabled users to include emoji in hashtags with the reasoning that “…just as we share photos and videos, we use emoji to communicate emotions and feelings in ways that anyone can understand, regardless of language or background.”

Dominos lets hungry people order pizza by emoji. The future is now, people! This past May, Domino’s debuted a system that allows customers to order pizza simply by tweeting the pizza emoji to @Dominos, followed soon after by the ability to order by text too. Ready for a pizza party? Here’s your how-to guide.

Chevy publishes a press release… written entirely in emoji! Chevy’s June press release about the 2016 Chrevrolet Cruze was issued in emoji form with the hashtag #ChevyGoesEmoji, sparking a wave of funny decoding attempts across the Internet. They put out an accurate translation a few hours later.

Facebook tests—and embraces—emoji reactions to status updates. A feature update will soon make it possible to respond to any post with your choice of six emojis. Unveiled in October, the new “Reactions” will sit alongside the original “like” thumbs-up icon to let users quickly respond with love, laughter, happiness, shock, sadness, and anger. Read more and watch a video showing how the new feature works on TechCrunch.

Apple adds 184 new emoji to iOS 9.1. You can now use emoji to send a unicorn, a cheese wedge, a face with rolling eyes (finally!), and more to the people and brands in your life via text and social media. See them all here.

Emojis For Real Estate

Can you imagine ways to use emojis for real estate marketing? This is probably more feasible for the multifamily industry than for commercial property managers. Residents can already pay their rents by text. Will there be a time that renters can just text—or even tweet—the moneybags emoji to their property management company to instantly pay any and all fees?

Here at Yardi, we probably won’t send out an emoji press release anytime soon, but we think the emojification of property marketing is inevitable given the emoji’s ability to quickly communicate messages and feelings across languages. If you use RentCafe to manage your property marketing sites and communicate with residents, you already have the ability to add select emojis to your email blasts to residents. And real estate agents who follow our Point2 Agent blog might remember a recent post that teaches you how to make custom emojis (and how to use them to communicate with clients too).

There’s no telling what kind of emoji tricks we might have up our sleeves for the future, but

emojigrams

Have you embraced emojis yet? If so, what kind of marketing uses can you envision?

AUTHOR

Geneva Ives is a senior marketing manager at Yardi. Based in Santa Barbara, her focus is on marketing strategies for multifamily. If you want to talk about content strategy, search optimization, food or knitting, feel free to get in touch.