With World Emoji Day coming in just around the corner on July 17th, let’s take a look at one of the most pressing questions in advertising – Should brands use emojis as part of their marketing strategy? The short answer would be “yes.” The longer answer needs more details.

Here Are 4 Reasons Brands Should Use Emojis in Advertising

1. Emojis Scale Past Language Barriers
It’s no secret that emojis are universally understood by people everywhere in the world. So, if your brand is interested in expanding into a new state or country, using emojis as part of the initial marketing strategy could be a great way to gain the attention of the local folks.

2. They Improve the Rate of Engagement
Text can quickly get boring. And given the volume of wordy advertising campaigns being churned out every day, using emojis can be a refreshing change for the end user. In fact, using emojis can improve engagement by nearly 48% on platforms like Instagram.

3. They’re Easily Processed by The Human Brain
The human brain processes visuals several times faster than text. Scientists from MIT have found that we can process entire images in as few as 13 milliseconds. Brands can use this to their advantage and convey a lot more with a single emoji than they could with a string of words.

4. Emojis Offer Opportunity for Innovation
Unlike text, which can only be manipulated to a certain extent, emojis offer greater scope for creativity and innovation. There are around 3,000 emojis in use today, and brands can even create their own emojis to convey their unique message to the end users and consumers. The possibilities are endless.

Practical Tips for Using Emojis in Your Marketing Campaign
The next important question is – How do you go about using emojis in your advertising strategy? While there aren’t any rules set in stone, you can benefit a great deal from these three practical tips we’ve listed here.

1. Know How Much Is Too Much
Don’t make the mistake of being too lavish with your emojis. Often, brands tend to err on the side of generosity and use too many emojis when just one would have sufficed. For instance, using a simple party emoticon when you’re announcing a sale or a discount on Twitter can get the message across more effectively than using multiple emojis.

2. Stay Loyal to Your Brand
Many marketing heads worry that using emojis can dampen the seriousness of their brand. While that’s not entirely true, the nature of your brand certainly influences the kind of emojis you can use. For instance, if your company offers financial consultation services, it’s best to stay loyal to your core theme and use smiley faces, the applauding emojis, and the thumbs-up icon.

3. Use Emojis in Multiple Channels of Communication
Most brands tend to limit the use of emojis to social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Given the informal nature of these platforms, this trend is quite understandable. But did you know that you could also use these little visuals in the subject of an email? Using the right smileys around Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and St. Patrick’s Day improves the open rate for emails.

The Bottomline – to Emoji or not to Emoji?
As is the answer to most questions, it’s best to emoji with moderation. Using them too much can make the novelty wear off, while not using them at all can make your message come across as stoic and unfriendly. The trick is to use emojis sparsely, in the right places, and in the right manner.

“I am so poor … I cannot pay attention!” Yup, this is a popular comedic one-liner. Not any more. The tables have turned. In a world evolving through all things digital and networking through social media, it is time to create rich videos that grab and hold attention. ‘Attention’ is a precious commodity, and brand marketers are vying for it. In the Game of Consumer Acquisition, the mother of all battles takes place in the visual domain.

It is a well-known fact that in today’s world of digital saturation, human attention span is getting shorter. A Microsoft study estimated that between the years 2000 and 2016, the human attention span shortened from roughly 20 seconds to eight seconds on average. Therefore, it is paramount to front-load the first few seconds of your video with the most engaging content, hook in the target audience and continue to keep them glued through the rest of your video. The most creative and engaging videos have the most likely to go viral on social media – whether it is a video ad or informational video asset – earning you brand visibility, earning links and growing your authority for better SEO performance.

Video content supports many business objectives such as customer acquisition, education, retention, extended loyalty and further growth through consumer advocacy. The overarching goal of the video is to promote a narrative, product, service or brand awareness, and recall.

The overarching goal of the video is to promote a narrative, product, service or brand awareness. It is no wonder then that video is becoming an integral part of an effective content marketing strategy.

Here are 10 tips to create a successful video marketing campaign:

• Simplify – Avoid complex and heavy content as it causes cognitive overload.
• Visuals – Use relatable visuals to convey your message and tell your story.
• Storytelling – Informational videos are better recalled through storytelling.
• Duration – Assess the right duration for the video without unnecessarily stretching it out. Shorter videos are consumed more readily. Less than 30 seconds is ideal for a video ad, up to 3 minutes ideal for ungated videos featured in your blog or resources section. Gated video asset can be much longer, and the length is determined by the topics covered.
• Use Subtitles or Captions – This is a good way to accommodate people watching in a noisy environment who may not be able to hear the audio on mobile devices.
• Front-load Content – It is important to hook people in during the first few seconds of the video with impactful content to increase engagement and make it more viral.
• Live Video – If you have an audience list via email marketing or other digital marketing campaigns, inform them and try to broadcast live during webinars and events as people are more drawn to real-time content.
• Variations – Experimentation can be a learning methodology to truly understand your audience. Try different captions, messages, duration, copy, platform and colors to hone-in on your ideal video. You could also try an animated video. This can be particularly effective if you want to create a brand association with a mascot or visual element.
• Share – Make your video share-friendly to encourage sharing to extend the viral reach through social media platforms. Syndication on relevant video sites and platforms can also increase video views, brand visibility and recall.
• Analytics – It’s critical to measure ROI as well as to leverage any information you garner for future video campaigns.

This is how a marketer can augment visual consumption in an attention economy. Videos that are consumed the most are fun and entertaining, thoroughly engaging via visual storytelling, and innately inspiring to connect with the deeper human emotions. For effective use of video, you don’t always need specialist video marketers. Ideas for a creative video can come from within your marketing team.

Maximize the SEO and Inbound Marketing Potential of Your Video

Take your video marketing strategy one step further. While the tips above can improve the quality of your video and the engagement it gets, optimizing your video for search engines can and take the returns from your marketing efforts to the next level.

• Enable embedding on your video. This will allow others to share it and possibly grow your inbound links.
• Implement video sitemaps and submit them for indexing through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Use enticing descriptions to encourage clicks and also to help Google understand what your video is about.
• Add a caption that summarizes what the video contains to set the context for visitors and tell search engines what the video is about.
• Add a video transcript where possible to add relevant content to the page. This helps visitors who prefer to read vs. watch or listen, and also provides indexable content to search engines that can help the video get more views.
• Use relevant keywords in the title and description.

These are just a few of SEO best practices for optimizing a video. By sharing your video on your own domain before sharing on social media and implementing these tips, can help search engines find your video, send the right traffic, increase the chances of click-through rates, and overall conversions.

Video Marketing Trends

It is also a known fact that we are all tuned in to the world of instantaneous satisfaction with binge-watching, where you get to eliminate the long anxious gaps between episodes. According to a Deloitte survey, nearly 73% of Americans binge watch. This goes to prove that if the audience can relate to the content or likes the content, they do pay attention and watch.

Although short attention spans and binge watching are two ends of the spectrum, it is clear that a fun engaging video has risen to the top of the effective marketing campaign tool list.

Hubspot surveys validate the rising effectiveness of videos:

• Nearly 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store¹.
• 97% of marketers say video has helped users gain a better understanding of their products and services².
• 52% of marketers say video is the type of content with the best ROI³.
• Adding video to your emails can increase click rates by 300%⁴.
• 85% of consumers want to see more video content from brands².

LinkedIn recommends inserting a simple form fill for lead generation about 1/3 of the way into the video-watching experience. While there’s a risk that the form fill could cause somebody to stop watching the video, LinkedIn says that if lead generation is an important goal, a form fill is needed.

It is recommended that you replace your video with a newer optimized version that incorporates learnings from audience engagement analytics such as what percent of the video was watched and where did the audience drop off.

It does not matter if you are B2B or B2C, your potential customers and target audience are watching a video of some sort, work related or otherwise. This opens up a huge opportunity for you to engage your audience with videos that increase engagement, reviews, ratings, and comments. Videos can lead to rich user-generated content, in the form of reviews, ratings, comments, and feedback. This can help you build authority and increase ROI from your online marketing strategy. Bottom line is, create a video that will get a tweet, a share, and engagement.

Video Is Here to Stay, Let Your Story Play

I’d love to hear your stories about how you’ve used video content marketing strategy to grow your business.

References
¹ https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
² https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-video-marketing-new-data
³ https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/video-marketing
⁴ https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/subject-line-stats-open-rates-slideshare

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