We’ve been all in on memes as a medium to build top of funnel awareness for brands (especially ours LOL).
Their digestibility and relatability are prime for social media virality that thrives on shares and comments. But their impact is deeper than just a subtle laugh on the timeline, memes are one of the best ways to let your target customer know you see them, you hear them, and you understand their pain.
Not to mention the psychological benefits that adding a touch of personality through your brand has on your perception in the market. Back to the whole idea that people follow people, not brands, memes give you the opportunity to add a personal feel to YOUR BRAND, increasing the likelihood consumers will want to follow your brand account.
I see so many brands experimenting with memes and it makes me bullish on the future of B2B content. Key word there though is experimenting. These brands have never made memes before, they don’t know where to find templates, and they’re falling into a few traps that are backfiring on them.
Memes have an INCREDIBLE upside, through one successful meme campaign the digital identity of your brand online can shift forever. Just look at Duolingo or The Empire State Building, they’re CRUSHING.
But on the other hand if you don’t use memes right, you’re playing with fire. Just look at RadioShack a few years ago.
So before we find ourselves putting out fires left and right because we wanted to dabble in some memes, here’s the playbook we’ve used over the last 3 years…
It’s generated 500 million views, helped us gain 1 million followers, 100k newsletter subscribers, and most importantly KEPT US OUT OF TROUBLE. 🤪
1️⃣. Finding Meme Ideas:
Yes you’re making memes, but put your Marketing cap back on. Finding the right topics to make memes on, all comes back to customer research.
First identify the communities your target audience hangs out in, this could be reddit, facebook groups, or even virtual events.
We use r/Marketing to source meme topics because we are targeting Marketers (aka YOU) with our memes. r/Marketing is a large community of 1,000,000 Marketers and almost always has some juicy topics that are being discussed.
When you’ve identified a community of your target audience, read through the conversations. The ones with the most upvotes, comments, and engagement are the ones you want to focus on.
This is the social proof you need that tells you your target audience cares about the topic. If you make a meme about that topic or the pain point they feel in that situation, there’s a higher chance of it landing with your target audience because you already have the social proof from the community that they’re interested.
2️⃣. Do This, Not That:
Now that you know where to get meme inspiration (can’t believe I just wrote that in an email LOL), what’s the positioning you should use?
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There’s two routes you can go with:
🚨: If you already have a cult-like following on social media you can make memes related to your product specifically. Like Wendy’s does here. 👇
Wendy’s benefits from their larger brand awareness so they can see tons of success with that style of meme.
🚨: But if you don’t have a big audience on socials and you’re still looking to build more of that brand awareness, making memes about the pain points your product solves is the route to take. Just like Black Rifle Coffee does here. 👇
Just because they’re a lesser known company doesn’t mean they weren’t able to leverage memes.
The goal of these memes is to build an audience on social media full of people with the very pain points that your product solves. This is so that when you do go to sell on socials you aren’t selling to an empty room, you’re actually selling to a captivated audience of ideal customers.
3️⃣. The Meme Tech Stack:
Boom, so now you know how to get inspiration and what to make your memes about. But how do you actually go about making the memes? What softwares should you use?
I LOVE using Capcut to find all trending video meme templates. Whether it’s Zendaya on the red carpet or an iconic scene from The Office, Capcut will have the green screen templates for all of it.
You can customize the background, text, and length. We make all of our video memes on our Instagram with Capcut.
Then for our static memes, the ones we typically post on LinkedIn, we use Mematic and Canva.
If you’re looking for a more branded look of your memes, create a template on Canva, and make your memes there. But if you’re not, then you can use Mematic.
*Disclaimer* Do NOT overlook the meme templates themselves. If you’re targeting Gen Z women, don’t use a Kevin Durant meme template, use a Taylor Swift template.
4️⃣. The Meme Text:
The ability to convey so much in such a short period of time is what makes memes SO valuable. Their digestibility is perfect for virality.
Like a picture being able to tell a story in a snapshot (aka worth 1,000 words) a meme has the subtle combo of text and imagery that’s worth a whole lot more than 1,000 words.
But sometimes I see brands slip up here and ruin meme’s digestibility. If the text in the meme is too descriptive, or more than 15-20 words you’ve probably chosen a template that doesn’t fit.
With your text in the meme you want to give viewers just enough context so that the meme makes sense but not too much that people can skim.
