What is Meme Marketing and how brands should leverage it

What is meme marketing?

More commonly known as meme-jacking among the marketing folks, meme marketing has come through as a sub categorization of viral marketing. Viral marketing is a form of marketing where mediums like word of mouth and social media networks to see through to the success of the marketing strategy. Keeping in mind the wide reach of memes, brands have now begun to target the meme community to create brand awareness. Being cost and time effective, meme marketing has become the latest weaponry for the marketing folks and as for the memes in marketing they become as innovative as it gets.

The meme market of India is growing exponentially, reaching lakhs and lakhs of people really fast. Brands use this fact to their advantage. No matter how many ads we try to shove down the youth’s feed they will ignore them all. But a good humored and carefully placed meme will resonate well with them. Contact – Top meme marketing agency in India

Benefits of Meme Marketing

The brands connect better with the millennials via memes than any other conventional method. They are a great way to catch attention and have recall value. Creating memes is cheap! All you need is basic software like Adobe Spark. Creating memes requires less effort as compared to other forms of content marketing because they require minimal amount of text. These factors make them very cost effective.

If distributed carefully, marketing with memes can bear really good fruit. It can help achieve a lot of leads and sales if executed strategically, thus, guaranteeing a good ROI. Memes do have become the new language of marketing, and more and more brands today are jumping on board to speak this language. Meme-jacking has indeed made its place in the world of digital marketing. There is no denying that memes have become the official language of communication among the youth today! We all have come by new memes every day and literally on every social and political situation. We laugh at them and then we pass them along to our friends.

The meme culture has witnessed a spike in the previous decade and has been expanding since and doesn’t show signs of slowing down because they are generic, literally anyone can create them. Memes have become a source for the millennial to learn about the happenings all over the world. They have become the perfect combination of information and entertainment i.e. infotainment.

A meme is basically an image, or text, or maybe a combination of both, or a gif or even a video that depicts a social situation or happenstance through a context that is relatable and also provides instant humor. A meme has the capability to send along a message with minimum text and pictorial representation.

Why and how do memes go viral on the social media?

The secret weapon of using memes in marketing is increment in the engagement and conversion ratios. Let us see how memes actually achieve this. To begin with, memes as compared to ads are really precise and does not require too much time or attention for their consumption. A picture is worth a thousand words and that is exactly what helps the case of memes and they are able to deliver their message with minimum text.

Memes are relatable! The memers have become so seasoned in creating memes, they always seem to know the perfect meme template for any situation to which their audience will be able to connect easily and relate to them.

Due to their relatable nature, people share a lot of memes to make a clear point in a conversation. Thus, memes spread across the internet really fast and connects a lot of users together. Memes have a long-life span due to their high relevancy. Clever memes resonate well with users and thus have recall value.

Due to all these factors memes go viral and reach a very wide and varied audience.

How do brands accommodate meme marketing in their marketing strategies?

As discussed earlier in the blog, marketers always capitalize on the latest viral trend, hence, they are now changing their marketing algorithm to integrate meme marketing in it. The memers on various social media platforms have managed to gather a huge dedicated audience for their meme pages through their humor, and brands want to get access to this dedicated audience. They do so through memes.

Their process begins with analyzing their buyer persona through behavior analysis, followed by finding the best trending meme templates that would deliver the brand message in the best way possible. These meme templates should always 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 so that they feel an instant connection with the brand’s message. This helps in increasing the engagement in terms of shares and ultimately increasing brand awareness. The meme templates used should already have a place in the meme community so that it gains popularity and impressions fast.

The final step in this process is the distribution of the memes. Correct distribution of the memes is the most important step in this entire process. These memes are carefully placed on the social media stimulants in order to gain maximum impressions, sales, website visits, brand advocacy etc.

How exactly did meme marketing become a thing

The job of a marketer is to always be on the hunt for new trends to capitalize upon, gain benefit and rocket their marketing strategy towards success. Once upon a time, this trend used to be of the advertisements. Ads used to bring victory to the marketers but as times change, so do the trends. The trend for the past decade and probably for the next one too is memes. They have practically become inescapable no matter the social media platform, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even Tumblr.

Memes have taken the social media by storm and there are social media accounts entirely dedicated towards creating and sharing relatable memes with their followers. Such social media ‘memers’ have managed to gather a huge following over the years through their humor.

Thus, memes hold a powerful place in the lives of the Generation Z. They have taken the form of an inside joke for the meme community. This came into the marketers notice as an opportunity to tap into these meme communities and reach the millennials. They see the meme market as another way to switch their gears and fulfil their marketing goals through yet another unique manner. Hence, meme marketing was born.

Hope you have liked the article, please feel free to share!