In this day and age, memes are spreading like wildfire
all over the internet, and brilliant marketers would take the opportunity to
use these viral pieces of content to their advantage. And, who doesn’t love a
good meme? They are funny, clever and great for social sharing. As a marketer, ‘memejacking’
(Hijacking popular memes for marketing purposes) appear to be a great way to
create some fun, engaging content that shows off your brand’s personality and
likeability.
Alright, let’s take a step back for a while for those
who are not familiar with the word ‘meme’. According to Wikipedia, a meme is “an
idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”.
A meme could act as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices,
which can be transmitted from one mind to another to writing, speech, gestures,
rituals or other imitable phenomena. The word meme itself is a shortening of “mimeme”
(From Ancient Greek means something imitated). Memes most commonly manifest
themselves in a visual such as a picture or a video, but it can also take the
form of a link, hashtag, a simple word or phrase, or even an entire website.
So, the biggest question is why memejacking is awesome
for marketing? In brief, memejacking for marketing is awesome on many levels.
We have talked about a few of these already but shall we elaborate more?
1. They are already viral
Basically
meme is fun, engaging and wildly popular and good as marketing tool. Rather
than creating something new from scratch why don't we just leverage the idea
that is already successful.
2. They make great social media fodder
Visual
content is practically made for social media sharing and because memes are
usually visually oriented, they make great fodder for your social media
accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, 9Gag and Pinterest.
3. They attract traffic, likes, and links
Because
memes are so share worthy, they are great for generating traffic and visibility
to social media accounts. Memes could attract likes, repins, comments, and
shares like crazy, making it more likely that your social content will gain
popularity in social media and spread.
4. They are quick and easy to create
For
some marketers, content creation is their common job. There are so many
marketing campaigns that depend on fresh content, and having some easy to
create types of content is a marketer’s dream come true. Memes offer just
that!. They are easy and usually take little time to create =)
Basically,
using meme as a marketing tool seems useful but can you think of any problem
that could occur from using meme?
MEME captures some forgettable little habits and make it visible through some compilation of jokes. Sharing ideas under fun and easy way make it more easier for marketer (of course!) in social marketing.
ReplyDeleteWell all of us agree that, you have to make an impressive impression to the targeted audience before you can start doing any other marketing steps.Although this is a fresh tool but let's not forget the negative impact that might be occurred through MEME, some of the ideas stated through MEME maybe fun but also might be accidentally offend other. In my opinion, some of the offensive ideas will also bring down the quality of the product that being marketed through this social media marketing tool.
I think memes are more suitable for having fun because it involves our funny but most of the time unconscious behaviors. Using this as a marketing add can be quite risky, because people might not take it seriously and risk of having missinterpretation of message
ReplyDelete