MEME MARKETING: What It Is & How to Best Use It

Table of Contents Hide

What Is Meme Marketing?
How are Memes Used in Marketing?
What Are the Benefits of a Meme Marketing Strategy?
Best Meme Marketing Examples
Meme Marketing Agency
List of Meme Marketing Agency
How to Do Meme Marketing
How Can Businesses Incorporate Meme Marketing Strategy?
Meme Marketing Tips
What Is an Example of Meme Marketing?
What Are Meme Ads?
What Are the 2 Ways Meme Marketing Helps Business?
How Do You Sell Memes?
Conclusion
Related Articles
References

Meme marketing is the foundation of easily shareable brand-amplifying content because millennials communicate through memes. According to a 2022 Wavemaker analysis, 55% of 13-to-35-year-olds email memes weekly, and 30% send them daily. With millennials and Generation Z accounting for 40% of the consumer population, marketers are obliged to use memes in their viral content strategy. In this post, we will define what Meme Marketing is, highlight its strategy and give the best agency examples.

What Is Meme Marketing?

A meme marketing strategy is the systematic use of hilarious entertainment with specific commercial goals in mind. Meme campaigns can produce material that spans from instructive to exceedingly amusing, to inject levity into the overall marketing strategy. Marketers have effectively adapted their brand storytelling over the years to cater to hard-to-reach audiences. Meme marketing is now important to byte-sized content marketing tactics.

How are Memes Used in Marketing?

According to a 2023 Omnicore study, 80% of people will watch a video while just 20% will read text on a page, emphasizing the significance of visual storytelling in social media. In an age where users are bombarded with ads with obvious CTAs, creative visual content allows people to engage with the human parts of your company.

It is a regular marketing activity that enlivens your social media and cultivates an online community that is interested in your content. Once visitors begin to associate any particular emotion with your content, you may freely shape that space to market your product.

Memes capture the attention of users with a simple picture, GIF, or short video. They work nicely with blog posts, product launches, email marketing, or even as simple stand-alone social media postings because they are labeled with specific marketing goals.

What Are the Benefits of a Meme Marketing Strategy?

A meme marketing strategy, believe it or not, exists. Not only that but using memes in your content is advantageous. This is why.

#1. Memes Boost Engagement

Sharing a fantastic meme is a sure way to get likes and shares, especially on social media, where people go to unwind, watch videos of amusing animals, and—you guessed it—look at memes. Making a strong first impression and attracting new consumers with humor is always a good idea.

And what better way to make someone link your brand with optimism and coolness than through memes? 74% of millennials send memes to make others smile. And that is the best form of engagement.

#2. Memes Are Costless

Do you want to spend no money on marketing while still getting exposure? Make use of memes. However, the fact that they are free is merely a bonus.
People prefer memes to complex creative efforts such as infographics more often than not. Naturally, it varies on the individual, but this is especially true for younger generations.

#3. People Connect With Memes

Most firms nowadays take a more informal approach to connecting with their clients; they aim to establish a connection with them, a relationship. And one of the primary benefits of memes is that they are extremely easy to relate to.

You can use them to connect with your audience, demonstrate that you care about the same things, have the same values, or simply demonstrate that you are funny and entertaining.

Best Meme Marketing Examples

Here are some great examples of brands that used meme marketing strategies:

#1. Netflix

In terms of developing entertainment with hilarious engagement, Netflix has been far ahead of its competition. Netflix memes have evolved from user-friendly content boasting about revealing account passwords—even if it harms Netflix’s sales—to engaging with the public through humorous tweets and comments.

#2. Penguin Random House

This meme takes the classic concept of jealousy in relationships and applies it to other thematic variations. Even publishing behemoths like Penguin Random House have integrated humor into their marketing efforts. Furthermore, instead of stopping at original meme templates, they continue to recycle earlier ones.

#3. Yappy

This meme template is adaptable and may be used in a variety of sectors. Yappy cleverly capitalizes on the current trend of having or adopting more pets to make fun of its target demographic.

#4. Gucci

In meme marketing, originality frequently takes a second seat to generate simple relatability. Consider how luxury brand Gucci used the old Arthur’s Fist meme to demonstrate its brand credibility.

#5. Diamond Travels

For years, the rapper Drake meme has been making the rounds on social media, quickly becoming one of the most popular meme artifacts. Diamond Travels used it to identify a major source of frustration for travelers: the hassle of planning and booking.

#6. Ruffles

This potato chip behemoth has a history of using clever memes to make its brand more memorable and entertaining. One example is their use of popular pop culture references to promote their new chip line.

#7. Denny’s

The breakfast restaurant chain is one of the most pro-meme brands, constantly promoting its memes on social media. They are so obsessed with memes that they have their line of them.

Meme Marketing Agency

A meme marketing agency is a company that creates and uses memes to promote brands, products, or services. Memes are images, videos, or texts that are humorous or satirical and spread virally online via social media platforms and other digital channels.

A meme marketing agency typically collaborates with businesses or organizations to create meme-based marketing campaigns that are appealing to their target audience. This could include creating new memes, modifying existing memes to fit the brand’s message, or curating relevant memes from popular culture.

Meme marketing companies also assist clients in identifying the platforms and communities where their memes will have the greatest impact. They may also provide analytics and reporting on the campaign’s success, including metrics like engagement, shares, and reach.

It is important to note that meme marketing is a risky strategy because memes frequently rely on humor or satire, which can be misinterpreted or offend certain audiences. A reputable meme marketing agency will have experience and expertise in navigating this potential risk and ensuring that the campaign’s message is positively received by the target audience.

List of Meme Marketing Agency

I can’t provide a comprehensive list of all meme marketing agencies. However, I can provide you with some examples of meme marketing agencies that have gained recognition in the industry:

Meme Marketing Agency
Memeulous
MediaKix
The Silliest
Hamburger Helper
Jerry Media
Social Chain
The Memesmiths
The Onion
MemeTeam

Remember that this is not an exhaustive list, and there may be alternative meme marketing agencies that better suit your demands. When searching for a meme marketing agency, do your homework and choose one with experience in your industry and a track record of successful campaigns.

How to Do Meme Marketing

It only takes a few seconds to generate a meme. You don’t want just any meme, though; you want one that will not only make an impact but will also promote your brand.

Here’s how to come up with a meme marketing strategy:

Step 1: Determine Your Brand’s Voice

A well-crafted brand voice may communicate with a wide range of audiences while maintaining a constant tone that appropriately reflects your brand’s image, identity, and personality. To maximize your meme marketing efficiency, the first critical step is to develop rigorous brand-meme compatibility standards.

Step 2: Determine Your Target Market

Memes use related content to attract and engage specific groups of the market. Determine who the meme is for after determining the brand voice. Market segmentation, analysis, and consumer demand research can assist you in locating the best set of meme templates for a given audience.

Step 3: Simplify and personalize

The effectiveness of a meme marketing strategy comes in improving a simple concept and customizing it for your target group. Hitting the sweet spot between promotion and engagement is a proven way to leave a lasting impression. Because there is so much content on the Internet, there is less engagement behind each post.

Step 4: Adhere to Meme Rules

Here are several meme world laws that emphasize the necessity of being crisp, quick, and trending:

Large and easy-to-read texts provide the best engagement
Use pre-existing memes but do not change their original meaning to avoid confusion
Extreme customization of recycled templates can severely harm your brand voice
Insert CTA messaging quietly

Step 5: Keep Everything Viral

While it is not always vital to come up with hyper-personalized original content, finding fresh methods to repurpose previous templates of viral memes gives you a competitive edge in content strategy.

How Can Businesses Incorporate Meme Marketing Strategy?

While there is no clear procedure for the design of a meme marketing strategy, it can be useful to examine these pointers:

#1. Define the Brand

As with any marketing strategy, meme marketing must represent the basic values of the brand it is promoting. The firm should choose its memes properly and avoid adopting unrelated memes merely because they are popular.

#2. Ensure the Meme is Relatable

The meme must also be understood by a broad swath of the target demographic for marketing to be effective. It is also necessary to address any cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic difficulties linked with the potential buyer.

#3. Take Advantage of Trends

The most popular memes that go viral tend to be related to current events. In a practice called memejacking, businesses can take advantage of these phenomena by changing the meme or the event to suit their product.

#4. Keep it Simple

Marketers should also avoid employing sophisticated, esoteric, or niche memes as a general rule. These memes are more likely to fail and, in any event, will only reach a small portion of the intended audience.

#5. Follow the Rules

Consumers dislike meme marketing that tries too hard to be humorous or is used inappropriately. To prevent these issues, marketers must first grasp the purpose or humor underlying the meme and, most crucially, ensure that it remains recognizable after being changed to suit.

Meme Marketing Tips

Here are some more meme marketing strategies and best practices to keep in mind while creating memes for your content strategy:

#1. Make Sure You Understand Memes

Memes are primarily aimed at younger generations. And there’s nothing more embarrassing than attempting to blend in with young people and failing miserably. Make sure you follow the unwritten meme rules: make it short, straightforward, and true to the original idea.

#2. Link Memes to Your Brand

Everything you do, including meme marketing, should always point back to your brand. Sure, there may be a fantastic meme circulating that you want to publish to your social media accounts, but if it has no link to your business, it may mislead your followers as to what your brand is all about.

You can change memes to make them relevant to your company, products, or sector. This is what will transform them from a random social media post to a beneficial marketing tool for your company.

#3. Avoid Being Offensive.

Memes can be a lot of fun to make and share. But be careful not to get carried away with your joke. Take a step back before posting a meme to ensure it does not contain any offensive language or make fun of a certain group.

#4. Participate in Meme Challenges

Now and then, a meme challenge will appear, and it’s a good idea to participate in them if you can because they tend to gain more traction. Keep an eye out for new challenges and come up with creative methods to participate.

#5. Don’t Go Overboard

Sure, memes are entertaining. But don’t go overboard. Your social media content should be varied and entertaining at all times, especially on a visual platform like Instagram. A meme-filled Instagram page isn’t always visually appealing.

What Is an Example of Meme Marketing?

One example of meme marketing is the “Distracted Boyfriend” meme, which was used by the Swedish furniture company IKEA in a Facebook ad campaign in 2018. The original image features a man turning his head to look at an attractive woman walking by, while his girlfriend looks on disapprovingly. IKEA used a modified version of the image, with the faces replaced by products from their catalog, to promote their bedroom furniture.

What Are Meme Ads?

Meme Ads are advertisements that utilize memes to promote a brand, product, or service. These ads are designed to leverage the power of internet culture and humor to engage with a younger, more digitally-savvy audience.

What Are the 2 Ways Meme Marketing Helps Business?

Meme marketing can help businesses in two main ways:

Drives Brand Awareness and Reach
Builds Brand Personality and Connection

Meme marketing can be an effective way for businesses to reach and engage with a younger, digitally-savvy audience, and build a strong brand personality and connection with their customers.

How Do You Sell Memes?

Selling memes can be a challenging task, as the value of a meme is often subjective and depends on its popularity and relevance to the target audience. However, there are a few ways that memes can be sold:

Licensing
Merchandising
Social Media Management
Viral Marketing

It’s important to note that the market for selling memes can be highly competitive, so it’s important to have a unique and compelling offering that sets you apart from the competition.

Conclusion

Nowadays, the digital populace thinks in terms of memes. In reality, the format has evolved into a mash-up of pop culture allusions, phrases, and emotions, resulting in an entirely new style of communication. Memes can carry entire conversations!

Your clients are also fluent in this language. Meme marketing has the potential to propel your business to new heights while costing you nothing. All you need is a little imagination and the ability to follow a few simple rules. Take ideas from successful examples and memefy your way to the top.