In an era where many customers avoid advertisements wherever possible, messaging through humorous content generated using a meme may be immensely helpful in targeting hard-to-reach consumers.
Meme marketing can be an incredibly low-cost way for experienced storytellers—digital advertisers, traders, entertainers, and artistic pros—to produce entertaining content that generates a loyal following.
Across sectors, more advertisers are opting for memes to create loyal communities, connect with their fans, and stay in the minds of their supporters. Since memes are often associated with a trending theme or case, they add authenticity, modernity, and humanity to the brand.
Memes draw attention to current or cultural issues that your audiences are aware of, creating an authentic and new feel. This humorous content helps to unite an audience around a shared interest and lets the brand become more relatable.
Memes are about building participation and community. Communicating things that everyone in your circle can understand is a way to cultivate a sense of belonging, and this sense of belonging is already widely known on platforms such as Facebook.
This is why your brand should include memes in the content plan. If you can create and share targeted memes that appeal to your audience, you can create the same sense of community, build brand loyalty, and even open up new markets.
Moving forward, we will have a look at how you can effectively leverage memes as a part of your YouTube marketing endeavor. Let’s get started!
Memes for YouTube Marketing
Marketers and advertisers have shown tremendous interest in memes, and they are becoming increasingly popular in commercials and promotions owing to the amount of engagement they generate.
Memes can help you close the space between your brand and your target audience, and while they aren’t the marketing standard for everyone, they are certainly worth giving a shot!
Memes, by definition, are meant to be shared, because the material is often re-memed and re-posted across the internet to attract a larger audience. When people share a meme with a friend as a joke, they develop a sense of loyalty to your brand.
Although memes are now trending in the marketing domain, as with any promotional medium, there are a few points that you must keep in mind when you decide to leverage memes for YouTube marketing.
Ensure that the meme matches your brand’s voice
While a majority of YouTube marketers are aware that memes can cater to their target demographic, incorporating them in videos while ensuring brand continuity can be challenging.
As memes are becoming more prevalent, even high-end lifestyle brands are toying with this newfound promotional medium in order to remain competitive and develop a loyal following. Memes have the potential to dramatically increase your audience capturing scope, particularly if your target customer is a Millennial or belongs to a younger age group.
The trick to cracking meme marketing is to be authentic, but not being too traditional. Edgy advertising reveals that the brand has a distinct persona and voice, distinguishing it from generic commercial rivals.
Although memes are still considered controversial by many marketers, they certainly help in promoting niche positioning and targeting a small audience.
If the meme delights and entertains those who engage with it, it is more likely to be shared. Your brand will be able to attract a larger audience, which makes it easier to produce leads and profits in the long term.
Build a robust meme library
You need to look for common meme templates or viral videos, photos, or GIFs, and then add your own caption. You can also re-create an iconic GIF or movie scene’s dialogue that lines up with your intended message.
Since the structure provides an outline for the story, this approach fits well for first-time meme creators. When you add a witty caption, you turn a recognizable piece of media into something that speaks specifically to your targeted audience, providing your fans with a hilarious moment.
Since viral YouTube videos often become memes, keep an eye out for highlights and hilarious moments in trending videos to find new material for your YouTube marketing campaign.
Original content is relatively difficult to create because you would find information for the meme, choose a medium, and overlay any relatable analysis. It takes more effort, resources, and imagination, but the content has a better chance of being shared and getting viral.
Memes as a means for product placement
Strategically positioned brands in memes do exceptionally well in capturing the attention of the intended target audience. Product placement memes are a form of soft promotional medium that is an innovative way to bring the product in front of a large audience without sounding salesy.
Strategic product positioning is more likely to create engagement than a direct sales promotion. In reality, major brands are aggressively leveraging the meme format to ensure accurate product positioning that captures their audience’s interest effortlessly.
However, as a marketer, it is imperative that you focus on the audience engagement with memes rather than emphasizing your sales metrics
Leverage viral tweets for promotion
This is a trick that even major brands are actively leveraging to create high-performing viral content. When a tweet becomes viral, there is a reason for it. It may be due to highly relatable content that captures the attention of people or has a particular trending theme.
It is one of the easiest ways to create high-performing content as the content (tweet) has already performed well, and there are significant chances that the meme will become viral.
Brands constantly scour Twitter in search of high-performing tweets and integrate their snippets in a meme, with or without a custom caption.
Many successful meme channels on YouTube follow this particular approach for ensuring a constant theme throughout their content.
If you feel that creating original content is something that takes too much of your time, this is the best approach that ensures an optimal ROI for your meme generation investments.
Conclusion
Memes are becoming increasingly popular on visual content sites such as Pinterest, Tumblr, IGTV, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. More people than ever before are generating and consuming memes online.
About the Author
Sanket Shah is the founder of InVideo. InVideo serves millions of users from ~190 countries and has raised $20M+ from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global. He believes the future of video creation is in the browser, across devices, and collaborative.
He studied at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and post that he spent some time in Silicon Valley before moving back to India.
Leave a Reply