What is Meme Marketing? Tips to optimize Meme Marketing
Meme Marketing. Over the past decade, memes have become an important part of modern culture. It can be understood as a way to express emotions or a funny phenomena which is spread easily.
Memes are included in every corner of our lives. It can be said that the power of Meme Marketing is developing to the point that everytime we go online, we can see at least a meme.
However, not everyone knows what Meme Marketing is and how to effectively use Meme Marketing. Thus, in this article, CleverAds will reveal top tips that will help entrepreneurs optimally use Meme Marketing.
1. What is Meme Marketing?
Before getting to know what Meme Marketing is, we need to identify the meaning of “Meme” first. In 1976, an ethnographer Richard Dawkins had explained the definition of “Meme” in his book – “The Selfish Gene”. He used “Meme” to describe the ideas, actions or styles which were quickly spread from one to another among different cultures.
So what is Meme Marketing? Meme Marketing refers to using Memes as a way of promoting brands. Meme Marketing is considered an interesting method to connect with audiences or followers, and help businesses interacting with their customers.
Memes are easy to relate and can be shared with almost every audience on social media. This has brought out an enormous advantage for brands to improve on how they narrate their brands’ stories.
2. The benefits of using Meme Marketing
Memes are not used only for mocking purposes and making the audience laugh. Meme Marketing can be powerful marketing tools which businesses should optimize to gain back lots of digital advantages. We have summarized the 4 main benefits.
2.1. Meme Marketing helps increase interactions.
Humor is always a good strategy to create a positive first impression and attract new customers. Is there a better way to create an interesting first impression than influencing customers with your brand’s uniqueness and positivity?
Furthermore, Meme Marketing also assists your business in growing impressions, likes and shares. Especially on social media channels, where people come to relax and watch videos about funny animals.
In fact, research stated that 74% Generation Y và Z use Memes to make somebody smile. As we can see, Meme Marketing is one of the best kinds of interactions.
2.2. Meme Marketing keeps the minimum budget.
Have you ever asked yourself why there are so many memes on the Internet?
The answer is because everyone can randomly make a meme. You don’t even need basic editing skills to create a meme. All you need to do is add texts to a premade format.
Viral memes often come from TV shows or movies which have big influence. Therefore, digital marketers can save a huge amount of time and money from encouraging their customers or followers to interact with their content, only by using Meme Marketing.
2.3. Meme Marketing can easily get viral.
The biggest success of online marketing is to become viral. But it is hard to carry out this goal only by posting a bunch of advertisements on social media. Now again, Meme Marketing will help businesses to make the impossibles possible.
One of the typical case studies about viral marketing is the campaign “The most interesting man in the world”, which belongs to a beer brand – Dos Equis. The ad showed an image of an old gentleman with a beard, accompanied by an ecstasy voice-acting , which was chosen by the Internet to be one of the most popular memes ever. It has also become an iconic reminder of the beer brand.
2.4. Meme Marketing stays in customers’ hearts.
People only remember things that are important cho them, or things that attract their attention.
Effective memes can make people stop scrolling on their phones and start interacting with them. For instance, we all remember the posts shared by our friends which made us laugh hysterically.
If the meme is actually effective, there is a high possibility that customers will notice and bear in mind your brand. Although not everyone who likes your Meme Marketing will be your potential customers, they will definitely recognize your brand and keep track of your business.
3. How to create a Meme Marketing?
Creating a Meme Marketing is easy as a piece of cake. However, all businesses want the meme to not only catch customers’ attention, but also gain back lots of benefits. Hence, before creating a Meme Marketing, we need to pay attention to these ideas:
3.1. Who is the target audience?
Meme Marketing is the same as any other marketing strategies, the first step is to research and analyze, simply is to identify your target audience.
To illustrate, customers from Gen Y and Gen Z are considered as a group of target audience.
They are interested in the world’s development like Netflix’s film series, Apple’s new technology devices or Haidilao’s special services. They also lean towards the environment, tourism, fashion and reading.
Therefore, trying to attract this section of customers by memes about things they don’t pay attention to like baseball, will undoubtedly result in a decrease in interactions for your business.
3.2. Customize the original meme.
Overusing the used Meme Marketing is not a good idea. You can use the trendy memes, however, you need to understand clearly the meaning behind, and try to adjust it to your own brand and story.
If you are successful in integrating your brand’s name, symbol and slogan, your meme is promised with uniqueness and your trademark will get recognized easier.
To sum up, even when you are using a popular meme, you still need to change it to fit your brand,
3.3. Update with the trending topics.
Good timing and suitable topics are crucial elements to the success of your Meme Marketing. You need to know what is going around on different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.
Then consider if your customers are interested in that or not, can you connect this to your niche or your own product/service?
On the other hand, do not abuse Meme Marketing. Spamming memes continuously can make customers think that you are trying too hard.
In addition, pay attention to sensitive topics. Because using those topics may negatively affect your business’s reputation.
Read more: Digital Marketing Trends 2023 Forecast (Part 1) (cleverads.com.ph)
4. Tips to effectively use Meme Marketing
Meme Marketing is the spice for all of your marketing activities. However, this doesn’t mean that you just need to publish a meme and a huge number of customers would rush to access it the next day.
Hence, CleverAds will reveal top 4 tips for successful Meme Marketing that businesses should take into consideration.
4.1. Timing is Key
Creating a funny meme about something which is being discussed popularly and your meme will get viral 4 times more.
For example, in February 2021, when the movie craze Godzilla vs. Kong went to the top, the Internet is full of these two enormous guys’ fighting memes.
Taking advantage of this, KFC decided to join in the competition and directly target its prime competitors – McDonald and Burger King.
The meme was considered very successful for receiving more than 155.700 retweets and 705.000 likes.
This is the success that even largely invested marketing campaigns would struggle to get. But KFC has turned that into reality with just one meme. With creativity and humor, the right timing of the meme had undoubtedly gained KFC a resounding success.
4.2. Suitability
Humor will work best when combined with the right audience.
Therefore, businesses need to take customer’s age, culture, ethnicity and finance class into consideration before implementing Meme Marketing.
If you show a comic section full of “husband and wife” jokes to Gen Z, all you can get are dissenting glances. In contrast, audiences from the older generation may find it funny.
4.3. Creativity and Subtleness
Normally, the inspiration for Meme Marketing comes from a movie, a TV show, news or anything that is popular recently. Then, people add a little bit of their creativity and subtleness into the memes, resulting in thousands of memes shared in just a couple hours.
A prime example can be the meme of the distracted boyfriend. Some brands had competed with each other since this image went viral in 2017.
However, the brands’ results are completely different.
Jimmy John had made some effort with their own version of this meme but did not receive any attention from customers. The reasons for the failure were stated to be the lack of uniqueness and over-advertisement.
On the contrary, Penguin Random House’s meme has made an immediate splash because of its innovation, ease of association and it didn’t seem to be a lazy marketing effort.
4.4. Don’t force it too much!
Nothing is worse than forced humor. As a marketer, you will feel the urge to join in a trending Meme Marketing. But sometimes it is better to pass if you cannot think of something which is both funny and suitable.
Thus, don’t insert your brand’s logo into popular trends despite the non-suitable association to avoid the risk of being jeered at.
McDonald in Britain once tweeted a meme in 2018 inspired by the “Say no more fam” meme – used to jeer at strange hair styles.
The fast-food chain had made a meme version of their own, and we can clearly see where the problem is.
The meme had no meaning, and instead of spreading humor, the restaurant chain turned out just humiliating itself on the Internet.
Conclusion
Marketing has developed considerably over the past few years. Brand Management is no longer advertising, it requires more than that.
Even though the purposes behind are still selling products or services, marketers indeed need to form a real relationship with customers.
Meme Marketing is an effective marketing strategy that helps businesses increase interaction with their customers. However, before starting, we need to do research to understand more about our audiences, then analyze and identify the topics they find funny.
Remember to avoid creating topics which will annoy the audience.
