Meme marketing can be defined as using memes to promote your brand. It’s a fun way to connect with your audience or followers and gives you a chance to interact with your readers. Memes are highly social and can be shared with a large audience on social media, giving brands a great opportunity to promote their stories and brand stories.
Memes can be very effective, due to their sharing and carefree nature. They can become hot and viral quickly, and that is exactly why marketers use them to improve their content marketing performance.
Here are a few quick stats to paint a better picture:
- Memes have ten times the reach of an organic post
- The click through rate of a meme is 14% higher than that of an email newsletter
- Millennials look at around 30 memes a day
Benefits of Meme Marketing for Your Business
1. Memes are cheap to create
There are some cute and funny internet memes. Anyone can contribute, using sites like Meme Generator to add text and style classes.
Brands can use memes created by others for their marketing campaigns, but it’s a good idea to create your own memes if you plan to use them for marketing.
2. Memes can be a powerful strategy for brand marketing
You can also create incredible content yourself. That is, brands can create content that can become a meme.
For example, when Netflix released a trailer for its series The Bird Box, it provided the bedrock for many memes.
Netflix posts images like this to inspire viewers of upcoming movies, but they also want to encourage engagement. People began to use this image in new contexts, from the mundane to the absurd. It’s all about understanding consumer marketing trends and making them work for your brand.
3. Memes can show the human side of your business
When companies use memes, they show their emotional, relatable human side. That can mean gently poking fun at themselves as well as ongoing social causes.
4. Memes create instant feedback
Memes appeal to marketers, for all of the above-mentioned reasons. The intention is to go viral and that’s all the brands are talking about with the advent of social media.
As long as the meme effort isn’t malicious, marketers can use memes to create a direct response from their audience. If it fits your brand, it’s worth trying to create a meme.
7 Meme Marketing Campaigns Tips
Before jumping on the meme bandwagon, you need to plan a little. Good memes are a sure-fire way to get people talking. Bad memes will not be seen or, in the worst case, make your brand look desperate and out of touch.
Here are 7 important aspects of meme marketing that you should not ignore.
1. Time is of the essence
Just like a good soundtrack, a meme needs to be delivered at the right time. You need to invest in popular trends, keep an eye on what’s happening on social media and create a funny meme about the subject, this will quadruple your chances of going viral.
2. Don’t be blind
Comedy works best when the audience is well-informed. Show a funny movie with a “couple” jokes to a millennial and it’ll be poorly received. On the other hand, that kind of humor will appeal to someone from an older generation.
Consider your audience’s age, cultural background, ethnicity, and economic status before making jokes. Just because marketing a meme wouldn’t do it without some thought in the process.
3. Be communicative, creative, and informal
Memes work one way. Someone on the internet comes up with an interesting formula. Most of the time, this is from a movie, TV show, story, or whatever is popular at the moment.
People add their skills to this process and voila, you have thousands of memes shared within hours.
4. Keep memes consistent with your online identity
A viral meme will attract you to social media for a short period of time. But to get long-term results from your meme marketing efforts, the content needs to complement your online identity.
5. Don’t force engagement
Let’s be reasonable. There is nothing worse than forced laughter. As a marketer, you’ll feel compelled to engage with popular meme trends. But sometimes it’s better to stop if you don’t find something funny. Similarly, don’t put your brand in a trend it doesn’t belong in or have people laugh at you instead of laughing with you.
6. Consider your brand’s struggles
Sometimes, being able to poke fun at yourself is appealing, and using a meme to do so may just take your business from zero to hero in no time.
7. Don’t be a thief
If you’re going to use a meme, own it – your way. Don’t copy another brand or just share something for the sake of sharing it. Rather do your research and share relevant content.
Meme Marketing Examples
1. Netflix
Netflix is most popular with audiences under the age of 35, so it’s no surprise that they often use meme marketing as a way to connect with their viewers.
As a video streaming service, Netflix has almost unlimited content that translates well to memes, like the example above that uses a shot from their popular series, YOU.
2. Dominoes
This is another great example of a brand taking a popular meme and adapting it to relate to its brand.
The image used by Dominos here is an edit of the cover of Drake’s Certified Lover Boy album – which was taken to heart as soon as it was released. Dominos jumped up to speed (speed is everything in social media!) by changing the image to include their famous garlic.
3. Purity Coffee
Purity Coffee got a lot of attention from its followers with this funny meme. This screenshot of Will Smith pulling a disgusted face with the text of Purity Coffee added really makes for a meme that hits all the right notes: it’s funny, twisted, and doesn’t belittle them.
Tips To Create an Effective Meme Marketing Strategy
The question on many marketers’ minds is, “How do I create viral memes?”
If your content can incorporate these five elements, your chances of going viral are much higher.
1. Post for your target audience
You don’t necessarily have to treat meme generation like a marketing campaign. Often the best memes arise organically, waiting to be created. Any media event can become a famous meme, even a message as trivial as President Biden falling on a bicycle. It’s a harmless story that’s been turned into hundreds of funny ways.
2. Think carefully
The best memes take recognizable content and give it a new twist that provokes reactions in people.
In the United States, news about politics, political leaders, and inflation is always popular. These are always topics of discussion, so of course, memes follow. These words are “memes” because there are many ways to add humor to situations that are not actually funny.
3. Funny and relatable
In today’s society, many people use memes to connect with others for lighthearted reasons as a temporary escape from stress. Trending News notes that 38% of millennials and Gen Z follow social media accounts dedicated to memes.
Memes should combine internet trends with simple and sweet text. Humor is subjective, so you can’t always get it, but memes don’t work without humor. You need to be able to accept the absurd and laugh at yourself or the situation to create memes that amuse others.
4. Different effects
Memes have become an important communication tool for their interactive nature. The right meme has the unique ability to convey a great deal of meaning in a single image. Yes, memes are used as a funny aid, but 36% of Millennials and Gen Z use them to express feelings, and 28% use them when they can’t find the right words to express themselves.
5. Reasonable expectations
You don’t need a big budget, complicated photo editors, or deep pop culture knowledge to create a viral meme. However, you need to understand that creating viral content is often a gamble.
A meme remains popular until it isn’t. There are always big jumps and big falls in the popularity of memes. The same thing will be everywhere until suddenly something new pops up, and the old meme is now old news.
Conclusion
One of the biggest benefits of using memes is the reach that can be achieved. Memes are relevant to almost everyone, and with the right hashtags, they can reach the masses. Most importantly, meme content is more shareable than advertising and helps you increase your brand presence. If you’re not already using it in your marketing strategy, we strongly recommend that you consider doing so as soon as possible.
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