Should You Use Memes in Your Marketing?
What Are Memes?
A meme usually features text overlaid over an existing image, whether it’s something from social media or a popular character. The message is used to highlight something either humorous or relatable about the image.
Memes help provide some kind of social commentary on something, but in an easy-to-digest, humorous, and visual way. You can get the point across with a funny image and a short caption that’s often no longer than 25 characters.
Should You Use Memes in Your Marketing?
When they started to take social media by storm, marketers across the globe immediately started using them in their campaigns. Some companies hit the nail on the head with meme marketing, while others still get it completely wrong.
They, unlike giveaway items, tend to have a very short lifespan. What’s funny to social media followers one week can be completely irrelevant the next. This makes planning marketing or email campaigns all the more complicated
How can marketers and brands use meme marketing?
Identify what your brand is about
As with any social media marketing strategy, they need to reflect your brand’s core values and messaging for it to work.
If your brand is all about friendliness and warmth, then a meme with crude humor is likely to confuse your audience members and go down poorly with them. Therefore, personalize them to deliver content that suits your target audience. Thus, meme marketing research involves understanding your audience as the first step.
Be relatable
The memes you pick need to reflect a universally popular joke or a deeply relatable situation. If your target audience members cannot relate to the digital context, they would not engage with you, and it also might blow up your reputation.
Create proper buyer personas for them
Monitor conversations that happen online related to your brand or business niche. Give your ideal customer a name, age, interests, and possibly a backstory. This vital information can help you strategize your marketing plans for success. Plus, when you know what your target audience is like, you will choose better memes for digital platforms.
Personalize the most trending memes
One of the best ways to go viral quickly is to use memes related to a current event (also called memejacking) that has garnered universal interest. KFC, for instance, hopped on the famous “Bird Box” meme bandwagon around the time of the film’s release on Netflix by depicting Sandra Bullock with a bucket of chicken as she fights for survival.
Add originality to popular memes
Instead of merely reposting a popular meme, weave your brand’s slogan, mission, or product values into the text for a touch of originality. This not only generates a few extra laughs but also works for your brand recognition.
Time them well
Quite often, they have a short lifespan because they work around an event that not many people know about. To maximize your chances of going viral, do your research on how popular a meme currently is.