Meme marketing has evolved from a humorous internet phenomenon into a potent tool for digital marketing. Businesses are now exploring various meme marketing monetization strategies to capitalize on its effectiveness. These tactics involve:
- Cleverly integrating brand messaging and products into popular memes.
- Partnering with influential meme creators.
- Harnessing viral trends.
By strategically incorporating memes into your digital marketing campaigns, you can increase brand visibility, generate higher engagement rates, and drive sales. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, mastering the art of meme marketing should become essential if you’re looking to thrive in the online marketplace.
Social media marketing adaptability from the look of the rapidly changing digital communication landscape can be considered a go-getter skill in the digital realm of public relations, gauging from the speed with which marketing is accelerating.
Previously, social media marketing was considered a very effective tool for pushing a product. Still, even before we can fully adapt to it, meme marketing from the online niche is already setting new grounds for marketing superiority.
With its ability to creatively cushion situations through textual manipulation of “captions” to turn around a highly contagious meme, the digital marketing sphere is set to change a little more by including more customer-friendly humor-based marketing messages.
But what is meme marketing?
We all love memes; the more viral, creative, and riffable they are, the better. With the image and gif-based depiction of humorous situations that presumably resonate with real-life occurrences, memes in the digital communication space connect us better than any other form of communication, resulting in a cultural flashpoint.
Meme marketing, from the ideal definition of content as internet slang for anything funny or viral, is the ability to manipulate the virality and creativity of content memes to increase brand awareness and push an organization’s product through targeted audience segmentation with the lifespan of a meme.
Studies have found that most internet users are millennials and Gen Z, which communicates that an organization that beefs up its marketing techniques by applying concepts of meme marketing is set to perform way better than one less flexible to the digital marketing trends. Most likely, this is true because memes grab people’s attention quickly and often by being broad and highly precise. Sales will likely improve with improved brand awareness when used with marketing goals.
Importantly, with a meme marketing strategy that seeks to communicate just like the online users do, connection with the right audience is set to brew leads, hence lead generation, thus converting leads to sales quite effectively.
Someone might wonder whether meme marketing can be viewed as modern-day SEO based on how quickly it results in better sales.
Turning memes into sales requires a meme marketing strategy that includes but is not limited to:
- The selection and use of month-old memes in pushing a product; the pre-existing memes already have a pre-established sense of attachment to the online users, and manipulating them to fit an organization’s marketing needs not only makes them relevant in the marketing game but also enhances their shareability while the joke is still breaming in the online space.
- Making the placement light implies that an organization bound to utilize meme marketing needs to use the meme sparingly for marketing by overclouding it with marketing messages, which ultimately reduces the humorous taste of the meme itself. The takeaway here is that a meme marketing strategy should retain the humor underlying the meme, with a touch of subtle marketing messages but with a lot of authenticity and
- Identifying the critical distribution point or channel for the same. Some social media platforms work better than others in this endeavor, which might call for an organization’s market research to locate and use the best-suited site. The virality of memes flies much faster on the X (Twitter) platform, after which it becomes a feeder point to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, to mention but a few. Either way, it is the sole choice of an organization to evaluate and choose a platform that will best work for them.
As much as they work, as has been proven, loopholes still exist that might trap an organization or make them a meme on the meme, becoming an online laughing stock. Using stale or outdated memes could result in poor performance, as many might not readily associate with what has already been circulated and forgotten. Stale memes are the over-cliched memes that have gone around the socials and are considered expired. An excellent example of a hitherto stale meme might include Smudge, the cat that trended back in 2019-2020 for the viral photo of a mashup of a blonde woman yelling at a confused-looking white cat sitting in front of a plate of vegetables.
Utilizing such memes might change the public perception of an organization as outdated, with little online information on what is punchy. The use of new and out-of-the-box memes, a week or a month old, could be used as strategies to stay current in moving with the communication and marketing tide.
Memes blow and die, but before their lifespan expires, digital marketers could use their potency, shareability, and riff ability to enhance their brand and product.
I love memes, and I wouldn’t mind one more!!
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