Meme Marketing – A Serious Business

Three Basic Needs of Life – Food, Clothes, and A Roof to live,

Right?

But here you go in 2023; the memes are making their place as the fourth basic need.

Memes are taking over the world, and yes, it is right; memes are now like a remedy to treat depression, anxiety, sad thoughts, and unwanted vibes.

Every social media platform, newspaper, or any other communication medium uses memes to make its content more compelling, humorous, and relatable to the common public.

Known for their catchy, funny, and self-relatable humor, memes that started as inside and sarcastic jokes are now being used by big brands, organizations, newspapers, small businesses, and celebrities to build a huge fan following and engage them daily.

This phenomenon has started a trend of meme marketing and content marketing memes. Marketers in every spectrum are going crazy to customize their marketing strategy as per the current meme trends.

So, Let’s Define A Meme

 

 

We can define a meme as an idea or concept majorly bundled in images, videos, animation, hashtags, or gifs representing sarcasm, humor, and seriousness of the subject amusingly. This kind of content has become the new language of social channels and holds the power to become viral in a short time.

In the times when almost 70%+ buyers skip sponsored content whatever they can, marketing, advertising, and sales with sarcastic, humorous, and funny content relatable to familiar people can engage an audience that is hard to reach.

For professional advertisers, creative marketers, entertainers, influencers, and almost everyone who desires a near-perfect conversion rate, meme marketing can be one of the most low-cost ways to create content that gets engagement and attracts the target audience.

What is Meme Marketing Exactly? (Or I Should Say Memevertising)

 

 

Let’s start answering the question with another question.

How do you showcase your products or services to an audience who dislikes seeing advertisements?

And the most straightforward answer is – MEMES.

A subset of viral marketing, meme marketing is more than just a digital trend, and it’s here to stay for a longer time,

Let’s understand meme marketing in the language of memes.

Just Assume, If your target audience were your crush, her father would be the latest trend, her brother is the client. You are nothing but a newly joined digital marketing intern who just passed his electrical engineering degree.

Confused ??

Let’s make it simpler.

As per the current trends, memes have evolved as one of the most successful modes of advertising, communication and the simplest way to engage with the target audiences. Also, memes have set a standard benchmark for viral campaigns as well.

Also, the experts’ memes are the pillar of everything that goes viral, be it #IceBucketChallenge, #TheSuccessKid, #JCBkiKhudai, or any other campaign.

Meme Marketing and Advertising – The Ingredients of Viral Success

 

 

Memes produce instant responses and engagement because they relate to common people and teenagers. By definition, memes are meant to be shared, so the idea or content is frequently reposted and re-named over various social platforms to reach a wider audience. When people send the meme to a colleague or any friend for a laugh or for sarcasm, they emotionally engage with your content and the brand.

Below are the mentioned factors which create instant response and engagement.

1. Humor
2. Sarcasm
3. Easy to understand
4. Latest trends
5. Relatable
6. Friendliness
7. Fun
8. Aimed for a quick laugh

How to Get Started with Memes?

 

 

Ok, after this much information, you should be thrilled enough to start with meme marketing and advertising, but what will be the first step of your plan?

Well, there are two simple ways to get started.

Memejacking For Marketing – Let’s Ride The Wave

Memejacking (simply reusing popular memes) – is the practice of reusing (actually hijacking) popular memes for using your brand or organization or positively influencing the audience.

 

 

Benefits of Reusing The Popular Memes

• They are already great content for the social platforms
• Quick and easy to create because you already have the concept
• They will work like magnets for engagements, likes, and traffic

Best Tools To Hijack and Search The Most Popular Meme Templates

1. Meme Generator
2. Quick Meme
3. Make A Meme
4. IMGFlip
5. Adobe Spark
6. Canva

Create Your Own – Set An Example

If you would prefer not to hijack a trendy, popular, or fashionable meme, make your own. Creating your original memes is hard because it’s not already popular, and you will have to derive your concept from scratch. Also, you must match the concept with your brand aura and the elements built by your brand until now!

 

 

How to create creative and highly fascinating memes from scratch?

• Research Properly
• Fragment The Audience
• Use Tools Like Google Trends, BuzzSumo, Google Alerts, etc
• Be Creative
• Include Humour
• Be Sarcastic
• Relate it to the Common Issues
• Use your wit in the caption
• Always Play with Hashtags

Meme Marketing – The Rules You Must Follow

 

Research, Research, and Research

No matter what, you have opted for meme hijacking the original concept, or the initial step to making a viral image is to do extensive research. Use various social listening tools like google trends, google alerts, mentions, or more to identify what is in trend and what are the most engaging memes of the time. And, Use tools like IFTTT to create automated funnels to get notifications about the latest trends, about elements that are not working, get into deep with audience analytics, and try to find out what is type of content they have reacted to most.

Always Play The Native Card

Always ensure that a digital native is composing, designing, quality checking, and sharing memes from your brand so the dialect is always on point. If you don’t, the audience will quickly learn that you’re making a decent attempt to be cool, which will hurt your brand image.

Remember The Bottom Line

Memes aren’t only for school kids or exhausted office employees. They can be a fundamental part of your marketing plan if you observe some brilliant measures. But never, let us repeat, never forget to consider your brand values, elements, and aura; otherwise, it can be a disaster for your brand as well. It’s ensured that only a small or maybe a medium part of your organization will only understand the meme created by you. So, try not to attempt to make a meme that interests everybody. Know your intended interest audience and cater to their interests instead.

Meme Advertising and Marketing – Precautions

As per the various theories on the internet, there is almost 0% possibility of copyright issues when creating a meme, but it’s always good to take care of such things in advance.

 

 

Below are some of the best practices for creating the meme content

• Always check for the license of the media you are going to use
• Establish a clear policy about how your brand wants to use the meme
• Be careful and try not to indulge in a meme war with another brand

The Undisputed Kings of Meme Marketing

Elon Musk

 

 

Yes, that’s true – Elon Musk rebranded himself, using the magic of memes, perfect and maybe the most creative example of online reputation management. From his weed controversy to other fallouts, he has handled it like a king, a modern-day meme lord. His Cyber Truck was an instant success without spending dollars on marketing and advertising; it was just the power of memes and memes.

Netflix

 

 

I am sure you remember the wave of Sacred Games memes over every social media platform, and have you ever checked the official bio of the NetFlix India account? These guys live on the top of meme games, from Sacred Games to Bird Box to almost every NetFlix original they have delivered; meme marketing was their prime advertising tool.

Gucci

 

 

Yup, you read it right, luxury brands do not usually use sarcasm, humor, or trends in their digital marketing and advertising. But Gucci decided to soften its marketing tone, using memes as a part of a digital campaign for its new ‘Le Marché Des Merveilles’ timepiece collection. And surprisingly, they did a great job.

 

So, stop reading and start making memes ;), it’s time to go trendy (in the right way); you can always contact hicentrik (One of the best meme marketing companies in India) for result-driven digital marketing services.