For online marketers, especially those looking to boost brand awareness and engagement, memes can be a lifesaver. When executed, memes can attract a lot more eyeballs and generate engagement that is becoming more and more elusive in an increasingly cluttered online world populated by netizens with short attention spans. With memes finding immense resonance with social media audiences, businesses are attempting to include memes in their content marketing strategy. Some of the best practices of meme creation necessary for finding success:
Know Your Audience
The first step for designing content involves knowing the people you are intending to address. You need to ensure that the memes are seen by your target audience because there is no point in the humor being appreciated and shared by people who are not interested in your brand. You should profile your target audience not only by demographics and psychographics but also preferences, buying behavior, ethnicity, culture, etc. When you know your audience intimately, you can create memes that they will find funny and identify with and share with their friends and followers. Knowing your audiences will also help you not to commit an embarrassing faux pas that can project your brand as being culturally insensitive or plain ignorant, remarks a Meme Scout designer.
Ensure a Fine Balance between Engagement and Promotion
Memes are a great tool for grabbing audience attention and boosting the rate of engagement on social media with likes, comments, and shares. The focus is on using humor in a way that the target audience can relate to and make them feel part of an exclusive community. Much as businesses would like to engage in brand promotion, it is best kept subtle and oblique. Rather than trying to create an immediate brand association in the meme being posted, smart businesses try to adopt a consistent theme and tone that identifies the meme with their brands and helps reinforce its brand voice and personality. When using memes in your content marketing strategy, you need to find a fine balance between engaging your audience and promoting your brand.
Add a Dash of Originality
It can be tedious and difficult to create originals memes and wait for them to tickle the funny bones of your audience and get shared, according to Social Media Examiner. Memejacking or the practice of using memes that are already trending is a perfectly acceptable method in your meme marketing strategy. However, there is no point in just sharing other people’s memes even if they are hilarious. The point is that you want to make your audiences laugh while creating brand awareness and raising the level of engagement. It is, therefore, vital for you to craft an original and funny caption to an already popular image so that it has your unique stamp of humor in them and aids brand recall.
Conclusion
Memes, although proven to be effective in boosting brand reach and engagement, are not something you can use as a standalone strategy for your social media content marketing. The best way of optimizing the impact of memes is to use them sparingly after verifying they will be enjoyed by your audience.