How inculcating meme marketing in your marketing strategy is beneficial for wider audience traction
Entertainment! Entertainment! Entertainment!
People connect with memes instantly. No one tends to avoid memes because it’s a mix of humor and sarcasm which everyone likes to read, comment on, and share among friends and family. The prominent reason behind the fast explosion of meme marketing is due to entertainment and rending conversations that everybody wants to be a part of.
Memes in the last five years have gained a lot of popularity, it is a great tool when you want to share your opinion about something via ANALOGY. Memes saw great traction during the lockdown in India, where people made crazy memes around the pandemic, PM speech, rasode mein kaun tha, etc. Memes are highly shareable not just on social but also on WhatsApp.
Today there are two types of memes Static and video. The static ones help you represent consumer behavior, community behavior, or sarcasm in case you are a fun brand. The videos are clearly great to drive VTR (View Through Rate) as you give them a clear reason to watch it till the end.
So below are the following things that your content needs to be around:
- Popular face
- Popular dialogues
- Sarcasm
- Trending topics
- Out of context execution
With the growing popularity of cultural branding among advertising agencies, marketers increasingly look to social media sites for viral content to latch on to, and to appropriate for their marketing campaigns. Brands across genres usually see meme-making as one of the perfect occasions to engage with the audience on a topic that they were already willing to talk about. It gives the much-needed window to actually initiate a conversation with people.
This phenomena allow brands to portray a new prospect to make their brands go viral online. Due to their immense popularity, brands are trying to become a part of popular culture, and moment marketing has helped these brands in doing so. Digital advertising has progressed exponentially in the past few months owing to the lockdown and it has proved to be one of the best ways to reach out to the new-age audience. Such techniques help brands in building a community for a wider recall and better engagement ratio.
Since memes already saturate the Web, latching on to such content can be a great way to get your brand noticed online. Memes could be of images or videos, every social network from Facebook to Twitter supports image and video files, so using memes increases the chances that your content will be shared across many platforms and channels. It’s imperative for a brand to create something that connects with its audiences. Hence, trends are the quickest, cheapest, and hashtags way of being worthy to their audiences.
As memes help in bridging the gap between the brand and the target consumer. Vernacular is becoming a huge hit in memes helping us connect different markets. In the next few years, we will see this as an emerging trend among brands also to catch the attention in every possible manner.
However, meme marketing is not an easy job. it’s not simple as it looks, it’s always risky to be honest because you never know how viewers will react to your meme. But when any instance happens, brands jump the bandwagon, and as the subject is being trolled by everyone you are safe as long as it is not hurting mass sentiment.
There could be situations when there is a risk of brand safety when indulging, so it’s important to use popular and borderline content. If anything odd happens then brands should be cautious of the responses and then accordingly respond. That’s also one of the reasons where brands at times don’t use meme marketing from their own brand handles but use content partners or Influencers to seed the same.
Moment marketing is usually an opportunity for the brand, where the entire population of the country descends upon the internet to engage in a conversation. With social media continually on the rise, meme marketing has transformed hundreds of brands’ social media market strategies. This clearly shows meme marketing culture is here to stay and evolve.
About the author:
Shradha Agarwal, COO & Strategy Head, Grapes Digital