Today, memes are among the most popular trends, not only by individual Instagram users but also by brands that are using this kind of humor to engage their target audiences, build brand awareness, and engage in community building. Regardless of what the technical definitions say they are memes are highlighted by the fact that they usually possess some cultural relevance and are witty, clever, or sarcastic. Being relatable and highly-sharable, memes are ideal for businesses for building brand engagement. Some pointers on how businesses can use memes on Instagram and other social media: free meme maker
Highlight Your Brand Values
For marketers, one of the biggest challenges is to make their Instagram account as popular as possible. They need to be able to post content that their target audiences can relate to and find value in, so that they can drive brand awareness. Memes can play a vital role because marketers can use them to promote the values of their brand and build brand affinity. The use of humor, often acidic or quirky, enables the posts to cut through the clutter of the feed of users and engage them, according to the folks at Meme Scout, a leading meme creator.
Share Tweets from Your Community That Have Gone Viral
One of the most popular meme trends that have refused to fade away is brands using Instagram to share screenshots of Tweets that have gone viral. While a few meme accounts have been doing this for some time, more brands have now jumped onto the bandwagon to grab eyeballs. What is, however, remarkable is that the brands are not only sharing their own Tweets on Instagram but also hunting out Tweets from their community that they think reflects their brand’s attitude, voice, style, and messaging as they are likely to have better acceptance by their Instagram followers. Some marketers are taking this initiative further by adding backgrounds to the community Tweets to make them more relevant to their brands. Brands that can use memes effectively can more easily build relevancy, according to a Forbes study.
Promote Your Brand
One of the prime reasons why marketers are taking to memes to promote their brands is being funny, sarcastic, or clever, memes do not look like being vehicles for advertising or overt brand promotion. Because almost everyone loves funny stuff, memes are more acceptable to users than the typically in-your-face brand advertisements. By adopting a subtle approach, brands get themselves under the skin of their audiences without annoying them. Even though Instagram is gradually opening up its sales channels, the goal of businesses should be to use social media to engage their audiences more than promote their products and services. However, the good thing about memes is that they can actually do both rather well without being aggressive.
Conclusion
Memes can be extremely handy for marketers for building brand engagement in an irreverent way that is not possible using the typical social media posts. However, brands need to keep in mind that the content needs to be genuinely funny, understandable by their target audiences, relevant to their brands, and above all, timely, to take advantage of trends.