A successful digital marketing strategy must include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), web design, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and marketing analytics. But have you ever considered using humor as part of your strategy? Why not make your customers laugh while selling your content? Yes, we’re talking about memes, and let’s look at why they’re so important right now.
Since memes have become a global language, the digital world is shifting toward a faster adoption of meme marketing through social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. According to research, social media sites had over 326.1 million social media users in 2018. By 2023, the number is projected to hit 448 million. It has the largest number of users across all channels in the world. The average social media user spent at least 3 hours a day on the platforms. And most users are between the ages of 17 to 24, a great space for Meme Marketing.
What is Meme Marketing?
The definition of memes is well-known. A grumpy cat meme will always display sarcasm, while an excessively attached girlfriend will always be used for girlfriend humor. It is the meme’s visual cue that is more significant than the copy. The copy of a meme is normally held short and matched to the visual to provoke instant humor.
Meme marketing is a niche that is constantly evolving. It provides brands with a unique way to participate in interesting, unique, and forever dynamic popular culture based on current events. It’s the art of turning a brand’s narrative into memes and sharing it across all social media platforms with the help of a meme community. Because of the growing disparity between how advertisers want to communicate with customers and how people prefer to communicate, Meme Marketing has become necessary.
6 Tips to Successful Meme Marketing for Digital Marketers
- Find out what kind of Memes your new intern or a 21 to 27-year-old at your workplace consumes, talk to them and go to their Meme accounts.
- Be relatable. It’s important to strike a balance between being commercial and relatable to the target audience when it comes to branding. You want to project a good picture of your company without being too pushy, and you want to be funny without being rude. The aim isn’t to sell but to promote indirectly. Relatable memes increase the chances of shareability.
- When it comes to selecting a reproducible meme with cultural meaning, knowing your target audience goes a long way.
- Some of the best memes are inspired by current events, such as global events, television shows, and celebrity news. Getting the timing right is crucial because of the fast-paced nature of internet content; memes come and go in popularity rapidly.
- Please keep track of viral memes, their context, and their applicability to the current situation. Connect the two, and you’ll have a funny yet attention-seeking narrative for your brand.
- In a meme, the right visuals are extremely necessary. It’s a good idea to use a familiar image since that concept already has a place in the consumer’s mind and can lead to users engaging with it.
Meme Marketing by Major Consumer Brands
Amul
Is it possible that social media presence would aid in the sale of milk products? Amul, India’s most famous milk product brand, is the response. The brand is known for providing insightful and humorous commentary on current national and international affairs. With high-quality illustrations and clever copies, Amul India is nailing meme marketing.
Zomato
Zomato, an online food discovery and delivery platform understands its audience and keeps them interested. Zomato is crushing it on all social media sites, whether with competitions or choosing trendy subjects. To engage with viewers online, Zomato chooses hot topics and posts basic photos with strong copies.
Netflix India
Netflix is unquestionably the winner of the competition to create the most impressive memes. Whereas most big brands are avoiding memes, Netflix demonstrates how it’s done with timely, appropriate, and funny memes, a breath of fresh air coming from an online streaming service.
Durex Condoms
Durex, the condom maker company, has created a social media empire unlike any other condom brand in India, just by using ingenuity and imagination. The X-factor of this brand’s social media success has been the use of sexual innuendos in their posts.
Paytm
The expression “Paytm Karo” has become synonymous with making a digital payment by scanning a QR code. The phenomenon did not occur in a vacuum; Paytm India’s topical marketing campaign and overall branding contact have been used to reinforce and spread this narrative among users over time.
Meme Marketing: The New Culture
Memes have evolved into today’s social media’s voice. The landscape of Meme culture is so vast that following a few Meme Pages/Memes is all that is required to keep up with what’s going on around the world. To be precise, one can get information about ANYTHING via memes. Politics, cryptocurrency, movies, relatable content, trolling, views, news, and many other topics are now consumed as Memes on the internet, and nobody’s complaining.
It’s important to keep in mind that meme marketing isn’t appropriate for all businesses, as it depends heavily on your industry background. Avoid memes if the brand’s success depends on keeping a serious image in the marketplace. It will show up in your engagement analytics if they like your memes. And if they don’t like them, they would most certainly say so explicitly.
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