Memes - why are they so important in marketing?

With each passing day, traditional businesses realize the growing potential of memes. This is why they seemingly infuse memes within their online marketing efforts across social media to increase follower engagement. According to an industry study, a massive 75% of millennials react to memes, and a rough 38% follow different meme accounts on social media platforms.

Here's a detailed breakdown of all that you need to know before inculcating meme marketing into your business's brand's marketing strategy.

What Is A Meme?

​Unknown to many, a meme is a catchphrase, generally passed on as a joke-typically derived from popular cultures, such as television shows or movies. The term "meme" was initially coined by Richard Dawkins back in the 1970s. This is when anybody introduces a joke into society, and it would spread to the world like a forest wildfire or gene multiplication. 

One can very quickly identify a meme- they are generally an image. However, they can also be a video or plain text. You must also realize that appealing and engaging marketing memes can switch to varying formats. So, using a reputable meme generator to suit all your needs is vital. 

What Is Meme Marketing?

The growing relevance of memes in modern culture has encouraged corporate enterprises to bank on them for promoting their products and services. This is how more and more companies have collectively introduced meme marketing to the world. Simply put, they use the relatability factor to strike a communication channel with their audience online. 

Several companies available online are doing it smartly- one such company is Netflix who has made a particular name in the online community for utilizing meme marketing to improve their audience engagement. You could look into their social media marketing memes and realize their relatability. 

How Can Marketers And Brands Use Meme Marketing?

You could either be a meme marketer or an online marketing agency; the points mentioned below will tell you how to leverage memes for online marketing. Although there are no rules, sticking to these points will essentially help you in marketing through memes.

1. Identify What Your Brand Is About

At the beginning of any online marketing exercise, you would do well by identifying your brand. Your best marketing efforts must always remain in direct alignment with your brand's core values and message.

You must never choose a meme with crude or dark humor if your brand is all about friendliness and warmth. This is primarily since the meme will only confuse your audience members and contradict your brand messaging. Hence, it would be best to focus on personalizing your memes to deliver content that fits your brand messaging and audience expectations. 

2. Be Relatable

Secondly, you must also remember to only identify memes for your marketing efforts that have contains either universally popular jokes or deeply relatable situations. This is primarily since the whole purpose of meme marketing is to bank on the relatability of memes to communicate with your audience. However, if your chosen memes don't have any relatability, your target audience won't react to your brand message as per your satisfaction. 

3. Create Proper Buyer Personas for Memes

Thirdly, you should always keep track of all online activities that involve your brand or business niche. You could provide your perfect customer identification, name, age, and interests in an ideal situation. This information can essentially benefit you strategize your marketing plans for success. Furthermore, you will be poised to choose better memes for online when you know a clear understanding of your target audience.

4. Personalize the Most Trending Memes

It is necessary to mention that the most effective way to go viral effortlessly is to use trending memes or memes related to any current event. This is also known as meme jacking, where companies use memes with universal interest for online marketing. 

5. Add Originality to Popular Memes

Finally, you could always include your brand's slogan and messaging into engaging graphics instead of merely reposting all popular memes for relevance- this will bring your touch of originality to the fore. This will not only entertain people online but will also contribute to your brand recognition.

Final Thought

In conclusion, it only fits to admit that branded content always has the potential to fail miserably in front of younger audiences. This is why more and more corporate houses are tapping into online marketing memes to understand the new-age perspective of the youth.