By Rachit Sharma
Grabbing the attention of the consumer is the main focus of a brand, since the last decade there have been major changes in the strategies opted for doing the same especially after the arrival of social media. Brands quickly realized that they have hit a gold mine with social media apps, but to seek benefit from them they need to understand how people like to consume their data on social media platforms.
As people have a short attention span on social media, the content here should be short and engaging. The answer to this was simple but hard to believe; Meme.
Meme marketing is one of the most powerful social media marketing strategies out there today. With social media continually on the rise, meme marketing has transformed hundreds of brand’s social media market strategies.
But before diving deep into the fundamentals of meme marketing let’s discuss a little bit about memes and their creation.
What are Memes and Meme Creation?
A meme (pronounced meem, not me me) can be defined as images with sarcastic messages that are relatable, and fun. The Memes shared on any social media platform can be an image, video, or some text with slight creative changes. Several apps can be used to create a meme, all you need is to be creative and genuinely funny. Some of the best apps to create memes are Meme factory, Meme maker, Memedroid, here you can find trending memes templates to work on. But how can something so generic be of any use to a brand?
What is Meme Marketing?
Meme Marketing is expressing your brand’s motive in the language of meme’s. The major problem which a brand faces with any social media campaign is low engagement. Millennials and GenZ spend over 200 minutes online every day. Memes are so prolific that there’s a good chance millennials and GenZers are laughing at and sharing memes while online. This gives brands plenty of opportunities to engage with their audience.
All they need to do is keep their ears to the ground, to know what’s trending, to create memes. But users are smart now they can sense ads very quickly, so brands have to create funny and relatable content
Let us understand it with the classic example of the Cars24 marketing campaign:
Cars24 wanted to promote their campaign’s TV commercial, which was targeted at the over-smart ‘mamaji’ and a smart millennial nephew. For this, they created memes over the characters of their commercial, which were funny and very relatable to the users.
The results were pretty sweet; they had a total reach of 700K+ and an engagement of 100K+.
Why choose Memes?
Memes are fun; but brands are not interested in the funny part, but what intrigues them is its virality. The Successful kid or the evil Kermit have a place in their user’s minds, but what makes them go viral.
Reasons for Meme Popularity
- Precise: Memes are straight to the point, and in a way, readers can easily understand the zest of the topic they are trying to point at.
- Easy recall: Due to the interactive pictures or small videos used it becomes easy for our brain to store them and hence make the recall rate even higher.
- Relatable: Most memes created are inspired by a current hot topic or from general life, which makes them understandable and somewhat empathetic too.
- Shareability: A basic logic is that the more it is shared the more viral it will get and memes are super easy to share on any social media site.
All these reasons are enough for any brand to choose Memes in their next marketing strategy. Now the question is how we can use memes for marketing.
Is Meme Marketing Effective?
It’s a big ‘YES’, Meme is the trend of the decade. It has become the voice of the millions of millennials and GenZ’s using social media and is super engaging. If done right, meme marketing can be a game-changer for any brand. Brand have to make memes entertaining and share something valuable with the audience, to get the desired engagement and fan base. And it’s not new, as brands like Grammarly and Car24 have done this and the results are very clear.
And if you still have any doubt, then it would be sufficient that even one of the world’s leading businessmen Elon Musk hired a meme maker to handle Tesla’s social media.
According to Statista, social media platforms have over 326.1 million social media users in 2018. These figures are expected to reach 448 million by 2023 with most users between the ages of 17 and 24. Considering this India is a gold mine for meme marketing as majority of population in India lies in this age group.
Memes are very popular among Indian users due to two main reasons:
- Pop-culture-related memes are immensely popular among the masses and helped Netflix and amazon prime to create hype for their web series.
- The creative take on social events and current affairs. This makes them funny and informative at the same time.
Conclusion
Meme Marketing is the perfect example of how the understanding of ongoing trends can give any brand a much-desired head start. Meme marketing is a part of social media marketing or we can say viral marketing, it is very effective in itself but it can prove to be even more fruitful when clubbed with other aspects too. And the most effective of them can be Influencer marketing. But that’s a topic for some other time.
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