Today, emojis are an integral part of contemporary culture. With messaging apps replacing predictive text with emojis, the cute smiley faces so often associated with teenagers texting one another are now changing the way we communicate with one another.

Emojis have provided marketers with a welcome opportunity to interact and connect with a new generation of consumers that expect more meaningful and creative engagement. For businesses, learning to work with emojis has been an essential part of adapting to changing market expectations, and learning how to use them correctly can greatly improve your marketing efforts in the long term.

Emojis personalize your marketing campaigns

No matter what industry you are working in, your marketing efforts need to be personalized. Intuitive technologies, such as chatbots and targeted advertisements have created a new standard for marketing communication, which demands more meaningful and personalized content.

Emojis add a bit of personal flavor to marketing efforts, whether it’s an email campaign or Facebook post. Some of the main reasons use emojis effectively grab consumer attention:

• Consumers are more likely to react positively to familiar images, such as smiling faces that convey emotions that we can relate to on a human level
• Emojis release marketing campaigns from stiff formal framework of marketing by making content lighthearted without compromising quality

Using emojis to compliment your content, not define it, adds a personal touch to your content, which makes your brand more memorable and unique in the long run.

Emojis help you build deeper relationships with consumers

Not so long ago, emojis have gone from being seen as somewhat juvenile, to being considered a legitimate way to build consumer relationships. In a recent poll from Appboy showed that brands have increased their inclusion of emojis in marketing by 777% since the beginning of 2015. The survey highlighted that leveraged emotional content through the use of emojis did twice as well as rational content, while also allowing brands to gain a deeper understanding of their customer’s needs:

• Using emojis can help build consumer trust as their presence can make consumers feel more comfortable and willing to engage
• Emojis give consumers a wider vocabulary to express their feelings, helping business get a deeper sense of what types of content are working well and where there is room for improvement

To optimize customer feedback once you start using emojis, using data analysis can help you translate consumer interactions into usable information that can be used to improve your marketing efforts in the long run.

Emojis increase consumer engagement

Adding emoticons to your content can help boost consumer engagement, especially when used on social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram. They can be used to boost a call to action, grabbing users attention and giving you more room to engage with your customers:

• Emojis can be used to engage your social media fans in a conversation, encouraging users to interact with their own emoji responses, creating room for your consumers to interact with you in a more organic and lighthearted way
• Brands can grab consumers’ attention by implementing emojis into promotional content, asking users to share and respond to receive unique offers

Whether your brand is releasing a new product, of celebrating a milestone, emojis can be used to galvanize consumer engagement.

When using emojis for the first time, it’s important that you don’t overdo it and be sure to choose your emojis based on the context of your marketing content. Using emojis in a meaningful fashion is an effective way to boost brand awareness while creating more creative means of communicating with consumers.

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But unless you’ve actually engaged in social selling already, you may be unclear on exactly what it is, and how it could be implemented to help improve the way that you do business and engage with your clientele. Before you decide to start incorporating social selling into your sales model, read on to learn more about what it is, what it’s not, why it works, and how to do it effectively.

What Social Selling Is—and What It’s Not

You would be forgiven for thinking that social selling is the same thing as social media marketing or social media advertising. After all, the names all seem to suggest an incredibly close link—but the similarities really end with the use of social media to accomplish each. While social media marketing involves using social profiles to publish promotional material and social media advertising involves buying ad space on social channels,social selling is much more interactive—it’s a dialogue between you and those parties who are interested in your products or services.

Why Is It Effective?

Is your business still making cold calls? While cold calling used to be the order of the day, more and more sales teams are abandoning it—and for good reason.Over 90 per cent of cold calls are unsuccessful in achieving their desired goal, which is largely attributed to the fact that people just do not enjoy being called on the phone by a stranger. There’s also very little context for a cold call—hence the “cold” in its name. So if it takes so much of your time and produces such poor results, why not switch over to a better alternative?

Social selling, on the other hand, circumvents this issue by seeking out people who are already interested in buying a product or service. By engaging in “social listening,” sales teams are able to keep an eye open for key indicators of intent to purchase, as well as for people who are interested but are seeking out recommendations, additional information, or expressing pain points in the buying process.

Social selling works because it’s not about throwing a sales pitch at every person you possibly can and hoping it sinks in somewhere—instead, you find people who are already interested in what you have to offer, and you help them along in the process. Instead of a sales pitch, you offer insights, suggestions, answers, and anything else that helps build trust in your brand.

How to Do It Right

First, you need to understand the social habits of your customer base. For example, most successful B2B social selling occurs through LinkedIn since it is geared towards professional networking, while a significant amount of B2C social selling happens on Twitter.

Next, you need to know what you are looking for. Fortunately for you, people frequently use social media to express their interest in a product or service before buying it, often in the hope of receiving advice or recommendations. This is where the aforementioned social listening comes in—your sales team needs to know how to follow trends and keywords that indicate high levels of interest. Some of this process can be automated, but it’s best to keep a human element involved too.

The most important step is to know how to engage with potential prospects. On LinkedIn or Facebook, it helps to get an introduction through a mutual contact, if possible. In any sphere, however, it’s essential to know just how to communicate with leads in a way that isn’t pushy or likely to make them uncomfortable. As stated above, it’s important to build a strong relationship with them that focuses less on closing the deal and more on addressing their unique needs as a buyer. This sort of care and attention to detail is what turns a potential buyer into a customer, and a customer into a returning customer, as it instills in them a sense of trust in you and your brand, and they will associate you with a positive emotional experience, making them more likely to come back to you or recommend you to a friend or family member.

The post Is Social Selling Right for Your Business? appeared first on Relevance.

“Words are powerful” is certainly a threadbare cliché, but it’s one that, despite its overuse, remains true. What we say and how we say it has a major impact on our audience’s response. On a subtler, more subliminal level, so does typeface. Font, color, and weight are not just matters of aesthetics. They make deep-seated psychological impressions on how people read, comprehend, and judge that content.

With consumer skepticism at all-time high, all branches of marketing must design their messaging more carefully than ever. According to a study by Insights in Marketing, 74% of people believe ad content is untrustworthy, and 69% are skeptical of the information relayed about products, despite ad spending increasing by billions year after year. In order to combat this and increase consumer confidence, businesses must be detail-focused when creating content by best leveraging every tool available in an effort to win over customers. This is where typeface and font become indispensable. They are essential points of contact between you and your audience, yet they are often overlooked for seemingly more pressing concerns. However, there are four chief reasons why fonts and typeface matter more than you think:

Different Typefaces, Different Levels of Trust

In 2012, the New York Times conducted an experiment on their readership by publishing a two-piece article online, the first piece of which was a veiled test of the effect of typeface on credulity. The idea behind the test was to see if readers would respond negatively to such identifiably true statements as “Gold has an atomic weight of 79” if it is presented in Comic Sans. The Times presented a fact-filled article on pessimism and optimism, which appeared to different sets of readers in one of six different typefaces. Forty-five thousand readers were then quizzed on the believability of the conclusions reached in the article. Did typeface matter? Oh yes. The informal Comic Sans inspired the most ire and dismissal, while the more formal Baskerville was the most trustworthy. The results were so definitive, even the experimenters were surprised at the extent of typefaces’ influence over reader psychology and its overshadowing straightforward, factual content.

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Readability is Central to Engagement

Thirty-one percent  of your web page visitors leave within seconds, deciding your page isn’t an easy route to the information or service they need. Readability is key to audience engagement–if a web page’s lettering is too small or words are often broken by hyphenation due to mishandled line length, very few people will have the patience to continue. The colors and color contrasts you choose, the number of times you change fonts or even font weights, and the typeface itself also contribute to whether or not a web surfer slows their paddle and stays with your page. When it comes to readability and typeface, there are few hard and fast rules, but just keep it simple. Use as many typefaces as you need, but as few as possible. Shift colors and weights mainly for headlines or subheaders. Body copy tends to be size 10 – 12.12.

Varied Uses for Various Typefaces

Because serif and sans serif fonts encourage different kinds of reading, they’re used in different formats, for different purposes. Serifs, slight projections off of the letter, draw the eye horizontally and help the eye differentiate between letters, making the process of reading less taxing, especially for denser content. Sans serif, which lacks serifs (hence the “sans”), is best used for direct, precise communication like headlines or short pieces of copy. Due to major pixelation differences between print and online formats–books have 1,000 dots per inch, desktop screens have 100–sans serif’s more stripped down simplicity is often better for legibility in online material while serif is better for printed material.

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Eye Flow and Typeface Go Hand-in-Hand

A consideration when designing content should be, “how will the reader consume the content?” Typography can help control eye flow and direct attention to best suit your goals. The Nielsen Norman Group has found that readers don’t read every word of your text; instead, they scan it in an F-shape. Eye mapping technology has shown that readers’ eyes move horizontally across the top line left to right before moving down the leftmost margin, with each movement down corresponding to less movement horizontally, resulting in a pattern that resembles the letter F. Using attention-grabbing typefaces of varying sizes, colors, and color contrasts in headers and subheadings can help adapt your content to this pattern, making it easier for readers to scan and find what they’re seeking. It’s difficult to arrange all your key information along the left margin, but slight changes in typeface, such as different weights or color, that don’t sacrifice readability can draw the reader’s eye, too. The results: a happy audience, higher conversions, and greater customer loyalty.

Creating content that engages, encourages trust and wins your audience over is the goal of every business. Now you have one more tool in your tool belt to reach those goals – typeface. Do you have thoughts on how typeface and fonts influence readers? Share them below.

The post 4 Reasons Font and Typeface Matter More than You Think in Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

While all these big players are making their entrance in VR, Microsoft has announced that it is going in a different direction. The tech giant won’t be entering the VR space at all; instead, it will be releasing Windows Holographic, the first major foray into augmented reality (AR) technology from any tech company.

What is Augmented Reality Technology?

During a TED Talk filmed in February 2016, Alex Kipman, the man behind Windows Holographic, described AR as technology that works to “bring 3D holographic content right into our world, enhancing the way we experience life beyond our ordinary range of perceptions.”

In layman’s terms, the difference between VR and AR can sometimes seem confusing, but let’s consider what’s in a name. Virtual reality is focused on just that: creating a virtual experience. It isn’t real, nor is it meant to be. Augmented reality, on the other hand, is a technology that enhances the real world. Rather than isolating the user in a phantasm, AR technology provides additional information and possibilities in the real world, in real time.

In short, AR is poised to provide immediate practical uses and value to consumers whereas VR more clearly provides pleasure and escapism.

While technologies like Windows Holographic and Magic Leap, an AR startup backed by Google and Andreessen Horowitz, might sound like science fiction come to life and certainly do not lack any cool factor, investors have been traditionally hesitant to enter the VR/AR space.

This is due to a few factors: most of the demos of VR/AR have happened behind closed doors, the very nature of these technologies requires a 1:1 interaction with them, and finally, much of their success depends on third party content – the games, apps, and videos utilizing the AR/VR hardware – which is an unknown factor until the much-hyped hardware gets released to mass markets.

Yet investments are starting to swing in AR’s favor. Venture capital fund, Super Ventures, was recently formed to exclusively support AR technologies and Venture Reality Fund to invest in both AR and VR technologies. In fact, Analyst Digi-Capital conducted research that suggests that the AR market will be worth $90 billion annually in 2020, compared to a much smaller $30 million for VR.

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Augmented Reality and Marketing

Investments are pouring into AR because the AR technology market is becoming increasingly competitive, as early testing shows great promise for the application of AR technologies. Perhaps the most immediately impacted area of AR application is the world of marketing, which stands to see benefits as soon as the business field first begins implementing AR technology.

The possibilities of AR within marketing are broad and were discussed recently at the National Retail Federation, held in NYC from January 17th-20th 2016. The main point of AR in the context of retail was simple: Imagine walking down an aisle of goods and being able to pull up additional information on products on the shelves or even being able to see a 3D hologram of what a product looks like outside of the box.

Considering that 67% of retailers believe that brands can increase sales by creating stronger product representations on shelves, this has the possibility to be hugely impactful by bringing marketing materials to the store itself.

This is the power of AR technology. It has the ability to bring information to a user’s fingertips without much effort on the part of the user. Consider, for example, the company iQNECT that uses a form of augmented reality called “visual search.”

Through visual search, a user is able to take a picture on their smartphone, and iQNECT then provides additional information on the contents of that picture, such as links to a brand’s other content or upcoming deals. Not only can this type of AR provide all necessary information to users, but it can also take them directly to the point of purchase by connecting the user to an online vendor exactly when they show interest in the product.

These benefits are why early use of AR marketing is showing massive improvements across all marketing channels. USPS recently boosted direct mail response rates to 37% (up from 3%) by using AR to connect mail readers with electronic content, containing additional information on pricing tiers as well as an immediate option to purchase.

Similarly, AMC Theatres used AR to get a 75% CTR by using augmented reality movie posters in their lobby. Movie-goers could pose by movie posters and take pictures alongside their favorite movie characters. Not only did this provide fun pictures for the consumer, but they also got coupons and other discounts by taking the photo in the first place.

But what really makes 2016 the year of AR technology in marketing is the simple fact that it is finally ready to go to market. AR technology doesn’t require much from the user in terms of learning curve or overhead cost. Users don’t have to purchase expensive new hardware as they do with VR, because a mobile device can handle the processing power. As for usability, much of AR utilizes simple gestures that users already make on a regular basis, such as using a built-in camera or voice control.

Summary

Not only does AR make the sales funnel a cleaner process for users, but it makes the job easier for the marketer as well. AR technology for marketing could span all marketing channels and provide data on things previously impossible to track. How effective is a television ad or a billboard? It’s hard to say. With AR, marketers could track how many people engaged with a particular advertisement and how many then made a purchase of the product or service in question.

In a recent study conducted by SDL, 58% of millennials cited that they expect to engage with a company whenever and through whichever channel they choose. Unsurprisingly, AR technology is a comprehensive tool to enable potential customers to engage with companies by providing a seamless flow of information. In 2016, expect more businesses to begin using AR technology to better market their products in innovative ways. Maybe you should consider it too.

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The post Numbers Reflect Steady Rise of Augmented Reality Marketing In 2016 appeared first on Relevance.