Meme marketing has come as a sub-categorization of viral marketing. To create brand awareness, many of them have begun to target the meme community with a broad reach of memes. Being time and cost-effective, it has become a powerful weapon for the marketing people. No matter how many advertisements are shown to shove down on their feed, the youth will ignore them all until they find a carefully placed and good-humoured meme that resonates well with them.
Memes are the language on social media in which people communicate new attitudes and ideas. The meme culture has witnessed a rise in the past decade and has been expanding since then. It doesn’t show signs of slowing down because they are generic. Memes have become a source for people to learn about happenings all over the world. They are a perfect combination of information and entertainment, also known as infotainment. They are highly visual, making them a great tool to create, breathing new life into your social media strategy. The best part is you can take an existing concept gaining traction and cash on its popularity. Your share-worthy memes can get you likes, shares, and comments with the least amount of effort , you can get the benefits of increased inbound links and website traffic when posted on a blog.
Benefits of Meme Marketing
Most of them skip advertisements whenever they can; marketing with humour and familiar media can engage hard-to-reach consumers. For a professional storyteller, digital marketers, entrepreneurs, entertainers, meme marketing is an extremely low-cost way to create engaging content that attracts people. This is the main reason for brands jumping on the meme marketing bandwagon.
The brands connect better with the millennial through memes than any conventional method. Memes are a great way to catch attention and have recall value. Creating memes requires less effort than other content marketing forms because they need a minimal amount of text. If distributed carefully, meme marketing can bear delicious fruit. They have become a new marketing language, and more brands today are jumping on board to speak this language. There is no denying that memes are the official language of communication for today’s youth. We all go through new memes daily on every social and political situation. We laugh at them and then share them with our friends.
How do memes go viral on the social media platform?
The secret weapon of using memes is an increment in the engagement and conversion ratios. Compared to ads, memes are precise and do not require too much time or attention. A picture speaks worth a thousand words, and it can deliver its message with minimal text. Due to their relatable nature, people share many memes to make an exact point in a conversation. Thus, memes spread across the internet fast and connect a lot of users. Memes have a long life span due to their high relevance. Memes that resonate well with users and have a good recall value.
Brands accommodating memes in their marketing strategies
Marketers always capitalize on the latest trend; hence, they are now changing their algorithm to integrate meme marketing. The process begins with analyzing their buyer persona through behavior analysis, followed by engagingly delivering the brand message using trending meme templates. These templates should be a little edgy and funny marketing meme so that the brand comes across with a unique and eccentric personality.
The best marketing memes should be relatable to the target audience to connect with the brand’s message instantly. There will be an increment in the engagement in terms of shares and ultimately raising brand awareness.
The final step in this process is the distribution of the memes. The right allocation of memes is the most crucial step in the entire process, which are carefully placed on the social media stimulants to gain maximum impressions, sales, website visits, brand advocacy etc.
Here are a few examples of brands accommodating memes :
- Amul
To address any social situation, Amul’s topical creatives focus on the masses’ point of view. The brand’s trademark, “Amul girl,” distinguishes it in every way used to create content that focused on current events but in a unique way that gained a lot of traction, especially among the youth.
- Zomato
Zomato has a good understanding of its target market. They do not adhere to a strict posting schedule on social media, as they value quality over quantity. According to some experts, using a slew of social media platforms can wreak havoc on your marketing efforts. Zomato, on the other hand, demonstrates how to use multiple channels for content marketing effectively.
- Tinder
Tinder used meme marketing to promote their services as well. Tinder used the “adulting can wait” memes, which included some of the most popular and trending memes on the internet. The goal of the meme marketing campaign was to get young people’s attention.
- Nescafe
To promote their products, Nestle’s Nescafe cold coffee used a meme marketing campaign. The memes were funny and catchy, resulting in a large number of shares. Their brand ambassador Disha Patani, for example, was featured in the memes, which received thousands of comments and shares.
- Hotstar
Hotstar is one of the popular premium streaming services in India. Their approach to social media marketing is spot on. One of their most successful marketing strategies is memes, which their marketing team knows how to use.
Conclusion
The trend in the past decade, and probably for the next one, too, will be memes. Irrespective of the social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, they practically become inescapable. For the meme community, they have taken the form of an inside joke. This came to the marketer’s notice as an opportunity to tap into these meme communities and reach the millennial. They see the meme market to switch their gears and fulfil their marketing goals in yet another unique manner.
For good marketing, committing to a subculture or niche is the goal. When the content in your social media delights and entertains those who interact with it, it is more likely to be shared among other folks, making your brand familiar among the audience, making it an easier way to generate leads and sales in the long run.
