If you use social media platforms as a part of your marketing, it might be a good time for you to consider posting memes on them. As the younger generations take over the consumer base, memes have become more prevalent on brand pages, especially on Instagram. Things aren’t at the point where memes are a necessity for marketing and enhancing your brand just yet. However, the more the interest in marketing memes increases, the wider the gap could become between brands that do use memes and don’t use memes. It might be unconventional now, but one day Gen-Z is going to take over the market and memes in marketing will become the norm. I could even see a meme being used in a guerrilla marketing tactic in the future. Here are a few tips on how you can start using memes in your marketing!
Tip #1: Starting Simple
If you want to start simple, make reaction memes. What’s a problem you encounter from time to time during a workday? Or maybe you can go beyond your business and refer to a problem that anyone in your target demographic encounters. Can you make a joke out of it? There is a nice simplicity to reaction memes.
One benefit of them is that the feeling of a reaction meme never goes away, so you could grab any reaction meme template and get away with using them as long as they are not too old (for reference, the generation of the Willy Wonka meme template and other templates in that era are what I consider too old).
Another benefit is that they will always be relatable, or if they aren’t exactly relatable to everyone, it’s still easy to sympathize with the creator. You’re welcome to make reaction memes about your success, but memes about struggling tend to get more traction. Part of the Gen-Z culture is laughing at our own struggles, and if you’re making a meme about your own struggle, we can laugh with you.
Tip #2: Know Where To Look For Inspiration
As you get more comfortable with making memes, you’ll want to really dive deep into what’s trending. I urge you to not Google meme templates and use the first result that pops up—chances are, you’ll encounter a lot of old templates, and that’s what you want to avoid. The older the meme template, the less value and relatability your meme will have. Worst case scenario, people will be put off by your memes and not want to browse your page.
Instead, you should browse platforms that have a lot of memes and are constantly being updated. Examples of sites to browse are Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. While using Reddit for company marketing isn’t as common, it’s still a platform that stays up to date with the latest memes.
Unlike reaction memes, you’ll want to be more creative with the captions. You’ll want to try and adopt the language used in the latest memes, and you’ll want to act quick as some meme templates have a shorter shelf life than others.
Tip #3: Keep Your Audience In Mind
Keep in mind that the past two tips should be adjusted according to who your demographic is. I mainly centered the first two tips towards younger people since they’re on the rise. With an older demographic, it’ll be easier to get away with older memes. In fact, with an older demographic it might be good to use some older templates since they might not understand the newer generation jokes.
Tip #4: Know The Time and Place
You’ll want to know when and when not to post memes. Instagram is the perfect platform for meme marketing, but it would be out of place on LinkedIn. In terms of email marketing, that would mainly be up to your discretion and how you view your audience! Will they appreciate the meme or find it weird? Use your best judgment for this one!
I hope I gave you an interesting perspective on marketing! The main takeaway here is that it’s important to market towards both your current and potential customers, some of those potential customers being young people. In the context of real estate, I go more into detail about marketing towards students in my “Involvement in Student Housing” E-Book, which you can download here!
