Meme Marketing – It’s no funny business!

Memes can Market and That Marketing Lady gives you essential tools to kick-start your meme marketing strategy.

Picture yourself scrolling through social media, and all you see are “monotonous” marketing campaigns and brand promotions.

Known for their relatable humor, memes are taking over the world. The grumpy cat to batman slapping robin is funny, satirical, witty, and catchy, giving the audience a good laugh. Memes are like a virus, and they spread online quickly, which often gives higher organic engagement rates than any other social media post. They produce an instant response and an emotional engagement because they are so relatable to the common people. Since their basic concept is shared with your friends, colleagues, and family, the idea or content posted is frequently reposed and “re-memed” over social platforms, reaching a broad audience. 

Anushka Mittal (Tech Founder of a meme platform-Memeois), in a Forbes article on memes and digital marketing, quoted that “Our regular marketing graphics yielded 5% engagement [on Facebook and Instagram]. Using memes, we had about ten times more reach with 60% organic engagement. There’s just no comparison.” 

The rise of memes has not gone unnoticed by brands in the digital marketing world. Marketers are using these highly visual and engaging memes to give a new life to their marketing strategies. Memes have now gone commercial, and brands are now packaging their communication and campaign goals in the form of objective-driven memes to showcase to their audiences. Big International & Indian companies like Gucci, Netflix, Tinder, HotStar-India, Big Bazar, Zomato, and numerous others are successfully tapping into meme marketing strategies, now also known as “Memevertising.”

Think about it, would you rather share a funny meme about how good the new flavor of, say, your favorite chips is, or would you share a promotional image of it? Given a choice, you would want to have a good laugh and share the information simultaneously. We are not discounting the value of traditional digital marketing advertisements or campaigns, but memes are indeed a fun and fresh addition to it. So why not embrace them to market your brand? 

Let’s look at some essential tools for using memes for your digital marketing strategy: 

Know Your Audience:  Like all social media strategies, knowing your target audience is vital in creating memes. Memes are predominantly designed for younger audiences; according to YPulse’s latest social media behavior survey in 2019, 75% of 13-36-year-olds (79% of 13-17-year-olds) share memes. 55% of the 13-35 years olds send memes every day, and 30% of them send memes every day. That’s a considerable amount of young consumers who are making visual jokes a part of their language. If your marketing campaign is targeted towards a much older audience, they might not follow the messages your brand is trying to convey through your memes. Thus studying who your audience is and creating relevant content is crucial. 

Use Your Imagination & Get Creative: Whether you are recycling an original meme (meme jacking) or creating fresh new content, it goes without saying that you need to use your unique imagination to create/recreate a meme that is relevant to your brand and your audience. Meme marketing sounds fun but is not that simple, if not created with the right tone and context it can backfire easily or simply get lost in this cluttered online space. As a brand, it’s essential that the memes you’re creating match your brand’s voice and what your product or service represents. Everyone on the internet is sharing memes to stand out; you’ll have to put in some effort. Instead of just reposting them, get creative with them.

Fun Fact: Sorry, but you cannot copyright a meme!

Keeping Up With The Trends: Memes have a short-lived popularity lifespan, and if you’re advertising using memes, you must be up to date and follow the current meme trends. Research thoroughly on social media platforms and dedicated websites like “Know Your Meme” about what’s trending. It’s essential to track a meme’s relevance and overall popularity before replicating it on your social media platforms. As a brand, you should have quick access to your creative team to create content at relevant times. For example, creating a meme about the latest sporting event requires an astute team that knows what’s happening, what the audience follows, and follows through on timelines. If, as a business, you don’t have that in-house resource, then – Hire A Third Party Meme Marketing Agency. 

The bottom line is that memes aren’t just jokes for school kids or a past time entertainment anymore; with the popularity of meme marketing skyrocketing with big and small brands embracing this offbeat concept to engage their audiences and increases their brand reach, memes can be a fun and useful content tool in your digital marketing campaigns. So get Memeing!