By Joey Ricard - February 23, 2022
Need a fun yet engaging way to connect with your target audience? Then why not leverage meme strategy in your marketing campaigns online! In a time when people skip ads wherever they can, meme marketing turns out to be one of the most effective ways to connect with hard-to-reach customers.
Given the constantly changing marketing trends, being only promotional is not enough to make your marketing campaigns successful. You need to establish a genuine connection with the audience and be relatable even when you try to sell your products or services to them. And that is where meme marketing comes in. So why are memes popular for brand marketing? Because this highly shareable internet content offers brands an entertaining, easy, and quick way to connect with the audience. It is one of the most effective marketing assets that have gained enormous popularity and success in grabbing people’s attention over the last few years.
In today’s digital space, memes are a must-have for an online marketing campaign. You will be amazed if you know how many memes are shared a day! As per Instagram, 1 million posts mentioning memes have been shared on its platform in 2020.
After all, memes travel faster than news feeds and tweets. So, yes, everything related to your brand or business that you plan to share on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or Reddit, is worth turning into memes!
Memes are visual content, presenting news or speaking about an issue or thing around us humorously. These lighthearted jibes mostly feature viral images with funny captions on them. No one knows when exactly the modern memes came into existence. They started to get popular with the emergence of platforms like 9gag.com. Then with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., the meme culture advanced beyond imagination.
Memes of Winnie the Pooh, Harambe, Success Kid, Pepe the frog, Grumpy cats, LOLcats, Evil Kermit, and Doge memes (the image of a Shiba Inu dog) are some of the most popular memes that we just cannot forget!
And meme marketing meaning is using these memes to promote your brand. Some of the most popular meme marketing examples are the “Legend of Zelda” meme by Domino’s Pizza, the “Chart” meme by Seamless, memes by Netflix on different movies, etc.
As a part of your marketing strategy, memes are subtle and indirect ways of promoting your brand. If memes are the future of marketing, then it is here already! They are not just for getting a good chuckle from the viewers. They are powerful enough to drive engagement to the digital channels of brands. Check out more reasons to start Meme-ing right away as a part of your marketing campaign!
Do you know that most people follow a business page to avail coupons and discounts? And if that is the case, how many promo codes do you think you can post daily to generate activity? Not too many, that too daily, right? But with memes, you can keep your business page on social media hot and happening!
When you use memes for social media marketing, you make your business reach out to customers who might not yet be aware of your brand. If the memes you share as a part of your brand marketing campaign are good, be ready to welcome online interactions and impressions like shares, likes, reposts, retweets, etc. Meme marketing lets your brand engage without being too pushy or salesy!
Even though your memes are not always related to your business, introducing your brand to potential customers in a humoristic light can ensure a great first impression. Plus, memes are the language that today’s generation comprehends and speaks. Naturally, compared to any other marketing means, people tend to connect to memes better and faster, which leads to increased engagement. Netflix meme marketing on the movie BirdBox can be a solid example of boosting engagement using meme marketing on social media.
Compared to text content, people connect to visual content more quickly. But even with visual content or graphics, the time to capture the viewers’ attention is very little. As per studies, the average attention span of users today is shorter than that of a goldfish, which is less than 9 seconds. But when it comes to memes, as per meme marketing research, they catch the attention within a second, even before the users can move on to the next thing.
For example, promoting your brand or services through trendy memes such as Spiderman memes, Spongebob memes, etc., can help you grab people’s attention immediately.
Memes are humorous visual content that can make the audience laugh. Now, when you make your audience laugh, they relate to your brand more easily. So, with meme marketing 2022, you can create a sense of belonging and foster a sense of community in the audience as they can quickly relate to the situation you describe in your memes. The humor quotient present in memes lets your brand shine through.
We all know that comedy helps foster relations and begin conversations. That is what memes do in the form of visual promotional strategies. They are as much about establishing a connection as they are about evoking fun and humor.
For example, animals are a pretty popular subject in the meme culture on the internet. Now brands related to cats or any other animals can easily connect with this meme community through their memes, that too, without creating any controversy. Even if you are trying to sell something, memes can make your audience feel good about you instead of making you appear too pushy!
Studies show that the younger generations possess more buying power than others. Gen Z and the millennials are more dependent on online sources than they are on offline sources. Plus, they spend a lot of time on social media. As per reports, while Gen Z spends 4.5 hours daily on social media, for the millennials, the duration is 3.8 hours daily
And guess what, as per various research papers on meme marketing, memes have become the means of communication for this young generation. Hence, meme marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to attract and engage this large customer base online. Choose an apt meme context, add the appropriate promotional aspect to it, and there is no stopping from grabbing the attention of these generations.
Going viral is undoubtedly the holy grail of brand marketing. It is more like a dream for any brand or business to create and publish content that spreads like wildfire in minutes and takes their brand to every screen. Sadly, achieving this dream with usual social media posts turns out to be almost impossible. But with memes, it is a whole different story!
Meme marketing gives your brand the perfect opportunity to go viral. ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’ by Dos Equis beer is one of the best examples of viral meme marketing as per meme marketing statistics. After the ad was released, the internet picked up the bearded, debonair old gentlemen with voiceovers in it and turned it into one of the most viral memes to ever exist. But remember, not all memes go viral; only the best ones rule the internet!
One of the main advantages of meme marketing is the higher reach it offers. Take any of the best meme marketing examples. You will see that memes easily reach a mass audience when one uses them with proper hashtags. They are even more shareable than ads, which means expanded brand reach within a shorter time.
Plus, the audience today loves memes. So naturally, the feasibility of sharing memes across various social channels is higher than other visual content. And you must not hesitate to implement such marketing tactics that users tend to like more, share more, and repost more, right!
Memes do not need to be created from scratch. They are viral images that you can tweak by adding different witty captions as per your marketing goals. All you have to do is add a fun twist to an already existing image, and you are all set for meme marketing. Even memejacking (other companies using previously created memes for advertising and marketing purposes) is no crime in meme marketing!
Plus, you do not need to invest in any expensive software or equipment to create memes as they are DIY, low-resolution visual content. You don’t have to spend a fortune on creating amazing memes. There is little to no investment in meme marketing, which makes memes a money-saving and time-saving marketing technique at your disposal.
To make them, you don’t even need basic photo-editing skills. Just use any meme generators and add the text you think will work for your brand or business promotion to a pre-built format, and voila! You have a meme ready for marketing!
Yes, everyone and anyone can make memes. But the text you write on them needs to make sense and help the audience relate to your message. And that is why you can always hire a specialist for the content marketing job. After all, quality memes can do wonders for your social media presence!
We remember things that grab our attention. And good memes come with high recall value. Good memes can strike the right chords with the audience and make people stop scrolling their phones and engage with them.
We remember such posts that make us laugh crazily. We also happen to remember those posts that our friends share. Now, if the marketing memes you share are that good, there is a high chance that users may recall your brand.
Remember, all the people who like or share your marketing memes may not be your potential customers, but they might recall you, take a look at what you do, and become interested.
Featuring funny visual content, meme marketing by brands serves as a witty tactic of connecting with the hard-to-reach audience. It does not only make your brand look bold, unconventional, elegant, and harmlessly eccentric but also intrigues people to find more about you.
Plus, memes have the power to build communities online, even though for a shorter period. For example, when the meme of Bernie Sanders mitten went viral, it acted as a social glue to connect people by making them feel good and share a laugh in a politically turbulent time. So you see, memes on the internet influence a sense of community and belonging towards it.
As a brand, if you, too, want to inspire such sentiments, then creating and cashing in on the trending memes can help you engage your audience, inspire them and develop a sense of association in them.
It may sound surprising, but meme marketing makes a brand look straightforward, real, and modern in the eyes of the beholder. Since memes are made on ongoing issues, present trends, and current events, the content you present through them looks fresh, genuine, and of course, relevant. The comedy in the memes makes people forge a strong connection with a business. It humanizes brands and brings them closer to the public.
Brands need to adapt to a relaxed approach and a casual tone to communicate with customers today. It is the key to making your communication with the audience less robotic and more human. But this does not mean your tone and approach need to be boring. Well, meme marketing humanizes your communication and, at the same time, makes your marketing approach sassy and lively.
So you see, memes are such visual content that can perfectly fit into your marketing funnel and help you achieve the upper-funnel marketing goals such as customer engagement, brand awareness, etc. Start using memes in advertising and marketing campaigns and take your brand right under the limelight.
Need professional help with digital and social media marketing? Then, you probably need Klizo Solutions. We have a team of marketing experts, skilled graphic designers, and talented content creators who can craft impactful and relatable marketing campaigns for your social media and digital presence in no time!
So, are you ready to take your digital marketing approach to the next level? Then, give us a call today! Connect with us and get people talking about your brand the way you have always visualized!
Joey Ricard
Klizo Solutions was founded by Joseph Ricard, a serial entrepreneur from America who has spent over ten years working in India, developing innovative tech solutions, building good teams, and admirable processes. And today, he has a team of over 50 super-talented people with him and various high-level technologies developed in multiple frameworks to his credit.
