Memes and your marketing strategy

With the average person spending an hour and a half a day on social media, you want to ensure that your target audience sees your brand. You can do this by incorporating memes into your social media strategy. Memes are visually easily digestible content that can resonate with your audience.

What is a meme? In the 2000s, the concept of modern-day memes became a cultural phenomenon (although the word meme was coined back in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins). While memes can exist in short-form videos or GIFs, a meme is usually an image with some text added to it. They are typically funny, entertaining, and easy to consume. Due to their simplistic format, memes resonate well with people. They are easy to make and are sharable, and relatable. The wonderful thing about memes is that there is no such thing as plagiarism, so if you see a great meme, you can make your own using that image. Why you should use memes in your marketing strategy As marketers, it is difficult to constantly create new content for social media. This is where injecting some memes into your marketing can help. Memes are easy to do and save a load of time as most of the demanding work is already done. Use memes and you are almost guaranteed to get impressions, likes, shares, and comments. A meme allows the brand to engage with its customers without appearing overly salesy. There are two golden rules for using memes in marketing: Know your memes – Start by looking at memes. Make sure you understand the meme (and its context) before you use it. Check your competitors and see if they are using them.

Know your audience personas – You need to consider your target audience. Your memes should match the audience’s likes and beliefs. If you go against their beliefs, you could lose your audience. Consider age too – will the meme be relatable to them? How can memes help you with social media marketing? If you want a relatively easy and quick way to grow your following and reach on social media, then memes should become part of your strategy. Here are just some easy wins meme marketing can help you with. Expand your reach on social media Memes are great for expanding your reach on social media. Anyone can share them, and they all lead back to your business so you can quickly grow and scale your business. Building your brand awareness If your meme includes a reference to your brand or market in which you operate, you can build awareness of your brand to a load of new audiences.

Customer interaction Memes work well for your already existing customer and follower base. Are you struggling to get interaction on social media? If so, a meme is a suitable place to start. Look at the meme below – a still from 300 and an accompanying quote which was posted on a sewing brand’s page on Facebook. The status was simply “Does anyone else feel like this?” A simple conversation starter (and shareable content). Establishing your presence If your business is on social media, it wants to establish its presence and communicate with its audience. Memes help show a fun and human side to the company. Memes and copyright: Can I use any image to make a meme? Copyright around memes is a lot more complicated than we think and is certainly not black and white. If somebody uses a meme on their personal social media account, it is unlikely that they will be prosecuted, but big businesses could be issued a cease-and-desist letter or sued for using the image without permission.

Memes often use stills from movies. The copyright of these images belongs to the film companies although, if used on a personal social media page, is very unlikely to find the poster sued. However, when businesses use the image and turn it into a meme as part of their advertising campaign, then they could be seen as profiting from the image and the film company may feel that is a reason to sue the business.

We suggest that if you think it may cause issues for the company, then don’t use the meme and create your own fun memes without fear of recriminations.