Using Memes in your Content Marketing Strategy

Memes are a hilarious boredom-buster, but they can actually be a powerful tool in your content marketing kit as well.

The average person spends 100 minutes a day on social media, so content for your social channels must have cut-through: enter memes. When done right, there’s an authenticity about memes that resonates with consumers, instantly providing them with entertaining, shareable content.

But it’s not as simple as just grabbing a picture of the Ermahgerd girl and wacking your logo on it. Follow our easy rules to make sure that the memes you create will be a good fit for your content marketing.

Rule 1: Don’t be afraid of meme-jacking

By all means grab an existing meme and replace the copy with something relevant to your own brand. Or, take it one step further and keep the original meme’s copy, but change up the visual - like GE did numerous times with Ryan Gosling’s ‘Hey Girl’ meme.

Rule 2: Be relevant

Yeah, that Rebecca Black meme was funny… seven years ago. Best not to recycle a meme that a lot of people won’t remember. Have a look around on 4Chan or Reddit to see what popular memes are around right now, or create some fresh content by cluing in to what’s happening in sport, entertainment, celebrity life, and current affairs. Mark upcoming events in your content marketing calendar then be ready to take some screen grabs. Remember the priceless crowd reactions to the U.S Bishop’s um, passionate sermon at Harry and Meghan’s wedding? That had content marketing creators singing hallelujah.

Step 3: Don’t be too obscure

There is a meme for every pop-culture, subculture, high culture, random, popular, polarising issue out there. Unless your target audience is a very niche, specific group, don’t go too obscure with your meme content.

Step 4: Make sure your message is strong

Memes are funny, and are great material for facebook marketing. They should also be treated like every other part of your content marketing strategy: something that’s on-brand and has an end goal for your business. SEOMoz announced a funding coup by launching a series of Dos Equis memes. Funny and shareable, yes - but they were also informative and perfect for their digital-savvy audience.

So get the team together, bring up Buzzfeed, kick back and throw some meme ideas around. You never know - you could create the next Lolcat.