For a winning meme marketing strategy, do these five things

Memes are easy, crisp, convenient, and above all - humorous. Their tendency to go instantly viral, coupled with high recall value, makes them suitable tools for marketing. The changing preferences of consumers are also playing a crucial role in driving the attention of marketers towards memes.

Modern-day buyers find on the face marketing methods superficial, forceful, and too brand-centric. However, when marketers use memes to spread the word about their products/services, their endeavours are appreciated. They can create a sense of belongingness and keep their audience engaged.

Does this mean that every meme campaign is followed by roaring applause and remarkable results? Unfortunately, some plans fizzle out. To keep your strategies from going downhill, here are some things that marketers should keep in mind while pursuing meme marketing –

Look for the right talent

Humour is easy to perceive and enjoy, but creating funny content is not every man’s cup of tea. Even those seasoned in creating hilarious posts often stretch the storyline way beyond necessary to simply make it seem fun. In such cases, the very purpose of indulging in meme marketing fails.

Marketers need to look for the right set of ‘memers’ to create their content. Further, one person might not be fit for all brands or products. During the search period, you should be watchful of your potential creator’s previous works, ideologies, and tonality.

Relevance is the key

Memes are topical. Right from global issues to a common man’s everyday struggles; everything and anything can be used to create a meme. However, not all topics will resonate with your brand’s purpose. Moreover, some areas might be preferred by your target audience; whereas, others may seem irrelevant to them. Thus, marketers must do proper research before selecting the issues or topics they wish to talk about.

Staying relevant will make your campaign meaningful and help you hit the bull’s eye. A strategy designed to force-fit memes just because everyone is doing it will fall flat and lead to no productive results.

Seek feedback

With consumers becoming the king, feedback acquired a strong holding in the business world. Marketers ask for frequent feedback regarding features to introduce, post-purchase experience, product quality, in-store convenience, and many more. They gather data to understand their consumers better and roll out products that match or surpass their expectations.

Similarly, feedback is essential to understand your consumer’s take on the ongoing marketing endeavours. By factoring in their opinions, marketers will be in a better position to differentiate between the trends the brand should participate in and those it can let go of.

Further, gathering customer feedback will also help in starting and introducing trends. It assists in saving time, effort, and energy as brands are well-aware of what their buyers truly desire. They no longer must waste time in trial attempts.

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Create meme templates

Memes are dynamic, versatile, and time sensitive. If you are slow in engaging in a trend, then you might miss the chance of extracting all the outcomes that could have otherwise been enjoyed.

While following the road of meme marketing, the concept of first-mover’s advantage must be kept in mind. By creating meme templates, marketers can avoid losing out on the initial craze created by a specific trend. It is an efficient way to operate.

Further, by leaving everything to the last minute, you might end up jeopardising the quality of the content. Any delay in posting your idea may tarnish its uniqueness as others might have posted something similar. Thus, to avoid this from happening, brands should always keep a set of templates ready. A good mix of generic and topic-specific templates will be beneficial in the long run.

Be different

Meme marketing is not always about following the trends. It allows your brand to be a trend-setter as well. Starting a trend might sound tricky, but it’s not impossible. For starters, closely follow the present trends; this will help you pick out what type of content usually goes viral.

Once you have studied other campaigns, designing something unique and fame-worthy will become easy. As long as you keep it real, funny, crisp, and entertaining; there is nothing to worry about.

If you keep in mind these five things, your next campaign will surely be more meaningful, customer-centric, and impactful!