If you haven’t been living under a rock, you would probably be familiar with what memes are and the potential meme marketing power they hold.
Memes you have seen them! You laughed because of them!
You have shared them! Now it’s time to use their power and put it to good use!
But if you don’t have good knowledge of what memes are, that’s okay too. We’ll start from the basics and explain all you need to know about the world of memes and how various companies and marketing agencies have been using them to increase customer interaction for the most part of the last decade.
What is a meme?
A meme can be an image, a short video, or even a text which can be sent and shared over the internet. A meme is mostly humorous in nature but it can even have a satirical value or any other cultural or social impression associated with it as well.
You probably would have seen a picture with texts on it, circulating on various social media platforms as well as messaging apps, basically, any platform that supports sending images. Chances are that image or video was also a meme.
Memes are one of the most popular phenomena of the 21st century. Since the invention of the internet, memes have been around for the most part, but they got their share of exposure and user engagement at the beginning of the previous decade.
In fact, according to Google Trends back in 2016, the word meme was searched more times than Jesus, which had held this position since 2011. (Farber, 2016)
How memes can act as a potential marketing platform?
The fact that an average person spends more than 2 hours of their daily screen time sharing looking at memes, gives you an idea of how popular exposure through memes is, and the marketing potential it holds.
Marketing in its fundamentals focuses on promoting the business and establishing a relationship with the customers. This is where meme marketing steps in to ease up and at the same time boost this process.
People look at memes as a means of relieving stress because it has an endless supply of humorous content which the reader relates to.
People also tend to have a natural habit of sharing the memes they like with their friends and family who then might pass it onwards.
Thus a meme that was published at one place can be viewed at many places where people use the internet. This gives meme marketing individuals a widespread potential for customer engagement. Techxels is a platform that enables you to post a guest post very easily.
It has also been noted that due to the nature of the algorithm followed by the popular social media platforms, people mostly see content similar to the ones they already would be following.
Thus, this allows the marketer to classify and approach those people who fall under their targeted demographic of potential customers.
Meme marketing brings in traffic to a website, where the people visiting are genuinely interested in the product or services offered on the website.
Hence the quality of business promotion and client relationships established through content marketing will have a better chance of generating profits.
How is meme marketing done?
Now that we have explained what meme marketing is, and what it does, let us now have a look at how you can get into this creative modern marketing approach.
The basic goal of meme marketing is increasing customer engagement and business promotion through memes. This can be done in two ways:
- By approaching popular meme pages
- By creating your own account and publishing content on it.
The first method requires approaching the various popular accounts that have a huge number of followers and publishing memes that are related to your business on their pages. This will be sponsored content but the business generated through it overcomes that cost in no time.
This is a kind of small budget marketing that allows a business to benefit from the number of followers or the audience of the already established meme accounts.
This will be beneficial over the second option because it will reduce the time taken for increasing the reach of your own account.
On the other hand, it doesn’t give you total freedom to publish the kind of content you want, as you cannot go for publishing solely promotion based content.
Instead in order to have the best effect the content would need to be humour based so as to abide by the nature of content already being published by the host account.
The other method is creating and maintaining an account under your own business name on all social media platforms where you wish to do your promotions.
On each social media account, you will have to publish quality content which the audience would like and that will increase the number of followers you have and as a result the organic traffic you generate on your website.
But building up the number of audience members and followers from scratch might take some time in the beginning. However, having your own account gives you total freedom to post content which is totally promotional as much as you want.
Also read 7 Most Effective Internet Marketing Techniques Being Used.
You may even use an approach that combines the above two methods, and get already established accounts to post content that leads the audience to your account.
This will give you the benefit of both techniques, as it will increase your number of followers all the while getting organic traffic to your website and increasing your rankings as well as profits.
What should you think about meme marketing?
When it comes to increasing your brand awareness through memes, it is very important to know what kind of audience you want to target. As everyone’s sense of humour is different and there are a lot of accounts that cater to them.
Associating your company with an account whose usual content doesn’t align with the values and views of the company can have a negative effect among the stakeholders.
There’s a fine line between humorous and offensive content. This means that, though it is necessary that you post content which is not all promotion based and is humorous in the eyes of the readers, it is also important that you keep an eye on the sentiments of people which might get hurt due to some specific kinds of humour.
Thus meme marketing requires constant monitoring and the analysis of the feedback.
In summary, meme marketing is a recent trend that has solidified its presence as an effective digital marketing strategy.
That being said, it cannot compete with the traditional methods of marketing analysis which have been in practice for decades, but it can definitely be an effective way to increase your brand awareness and consumer engagement, with proper supervision.
Meme marketing gives a company a youthful image and brings in new customers without having to invest a lot into it.
