A meme is an idea, behavior, target, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of this view consider memes as cultural analogs to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.
When it comes down to marketing your small business, you need all the help you can get. Memes are one of those ways. The importance of having good memes is very big when it comes to marketing anything, because if you have something that others aren’t talking about, then they’re not going to buy what you’re selling. If memes are combined with other strategies like word of mouth and blogging, they’re much more effective than just using them alone.
The reason why memes work is that everyone uses social media for communication. They use it even when they don’t realize it. Memes are one way people communicate. When someone sees a meme connected to their product or service, this makes them remember your store unlike before where all the information was stored in their head.
Benefits of having Memes as part of your Marketing Plan:
- Memes can be shared through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest at a minimal cost.
- Memes are unique in that they’re easy to remember also you can Meme Scout to get the latest memes. Because of this, people will share them with others more often than not. Historical data has shown that shares get 6x the engagement rate of standard posts.
- Memes are a good way to get your brand out there into the social sphere without being too pushy about it
- It’s really easy to pick up some successful memes online and use them for your benefit
- Memes can be used time after time again without getting boring or becoming overused by other companies. You have full control over what you do with yours! Anyone can create a meme, but only true marketing geniuses know which memes work best for their specific industry/product/ service and how to make people fall in love with it.
Disadvantages of Memes as part of your Marketing Plan:
- Memes can be a risky strategy because you never know if they’ll work or not until later on down the line. For example, Burger King released a meme that had something to do with the Facebook ‘like’ button and received negative feedback about it from their audience. In turn, this affected their product/brand image and ended up costing them almost $200 million dollars. Luckily for small businesses, memes are not as expensive as this so there is less risk involved at the moment.
- People only share posts that spark an emotion. If your posts don’t have emotions attached to them, then you won’t receive much attention from your audience. This is why most memes are funny and happy-looking.
- Time: It takes a lot of time to come up with and make these images. You’ll need a graphics designer who is skilled in making memes if you want them to be successful for you. Having one person do all the work can get very expensive, but it doesn’t have to end like that. Luckily for small businesses, you don’t need an entire team of designers working on this project 24/7.
- There’s no telling which ones will go viral and which ones won’t because even something as simple as posting a picture of any random animal with an interesting caption can go viral in just a few hours. This heightens the risk factor in this type of strategy.
- Memes can be used in a lot of different ways to help small businesses. Just because Burger King failed with their memes doesn’t mean everybody else will fail too! There are many ways you could use memes to promote yourself, but if you listen to what people have to say about it, then maybe your business will succeed when using memes in your marketing plan.
- A lot of people will tell you not to do memes because they think it’s too risky. Others say that there’s no real future in them and that they don’t work very well. You shouldn’t listen to what other people have to say about something like this though; you should do the research yourself and then decide for yourself. Let’s take a look at history and the facts to see if memes are really worth using in your marketing plan.
Conclusion:
Memes are a good strategy to use for small businesses because they’re cheap, useful, and easy to understand. They could prove very useful in the future as more people catch on to them, but you can’t really know until you try them out for yourself. The only way to see if memes work is by actually making some of your own and posting them online. If people like them enough, then they’ll share it with all their friends which will help you grow your business.
