Ready to play?đšī¸
Happy Friday, internet people!
Our Main Quest this week is something thatâs close to my heart, and has supported me through happiness and sadness.
No itâs not my family or friends.
Itâs memes.
Main Questâī¸
Meme = Entertainment Marketing
Tech marketing in the past few years has gone through several trends that affected the medium and form factor.
We had the Educational phase: gated whitepaper creation, BOFU content, SEO blog posts.
We also had the community-as-marketing phase, where startups hired community managers primarily for marketing purposes.
After the ZIRP period, these community efforts became less important overall, except in certain verticals like DevRel.
Right now, it seems like weâre entering a new phase: Entertainment.
With Millennials all getting rich and internet-native Gen-Zers now starting to make good money, weâre also hitting a point where we are tired of hearing about work, business, and hustling all the time.
Yes, motivational content can be great, but most of the time we want to be entertained more than we want to be motivated.
Enter, the memes.
Thereâs a popular saying that a hideous man can pull a hot girl out of his league if heâs funny (Trust me. Ask my fiancÊe).
I think itâs the same with brands: thereâs an uncapped upside if you can make your audience laugh. It doesnât matter how small you are; in the meme world, everyone is on a level playing field.
Why? Because all of us want to be entertained. Most of us are over the shady, cheap growth hacks employed by startups and businesses.
We all want a feel-good vibe from someone thatâs humanâthis is why influencer marketing is absolutely hot right nowâand memes are a shortcut for a brand to be human.
Growth hacking is out. Growth vibing is in.
Memes are the entertainment with the path of least resistance. You can get that dopamine hit faster than watching a YouTube video or a Netflix series.
What's also interesting is that memes also have the least resistance when it comes to creation. You can literally just find a popular template on X/Twitter or Imgflip and add your own caption.
Here are some tips on how you can start doing meme marketing for your brand. These are the tips that I actually use:btw
Pick a meme first: Choose the meme template first and make a post, not the other way around.
Once you pick a meme, youâre already halfway through the punchline.
Of course, you can think of the joke first and then find a meme that suits it, but I found it faster to identify the meme first.
Be quick and up-to-date: Meme templates quickly lose their impact. When a meme is trending, get on it.
The Meme Alerts newsletter is a good resource to find the latest memes.
You can also follow accounts that frequently post memes, like Chris Bakke or Alex Cohen. I
stealborrow from them all the time.Some memes are evergreen, but if you want to use old templates, make sure youâve seen someone or another brand use them successfully.
Know what memes to avoid: For instance, no one is using the Good Guy Greg meme anymore. Donât make your audience call you a boomer.
Know your audience: You can only make memes that resonate with your audience if you understand their pain points.
Memes are like farts: if you have to force it, itâs probably shit. If you donât understand your audience and what your product does for them, youâll find it hard to come up with good memes.
Personally, my rule of thumb is, will the target audience say, âOh sh*t, this is so trueâ? If yes, you might have something.
Quantity is key: Conan OâBrien used to say that his late-night show was a âvolume businessâânot all of his shows were good, but he had so many shots on goal that people only remembered the good ones.
The same goes for memes. When a meme works, think about why it works. Usually, itâs because the meme you created resonates with a pain point.
Now, think about how to hit that pain point with the next memes, but from a different angle.
If you have any questions with meme marketing, just reply to this email and Iâm happy to help.
âWell, you can do it fast because youâre funnyâ
I genuinely I think this is something that can be trained. Same with everything, you gotta put your reps in.
âBeing funny just doesnât fit our brand voiceâ
Thereâs some truth to this. If you are Oracle or NVIDIA, you might need to consider the holistic picture. But Iâd say thatâs actually a rare case. There are far more privately held startups in the world than publicly traded companies.
Even if you are a publicly traded company, thereâs an opportunity to zig when everyone else zags by using memes. Just look at Porsche:
âWe donât know how to do itâ
Hire a social media strategist specializing in creating meme content. Thereâs tons of them nowadays (disclaimer: Iâm one of them), and you can hire them to run your social.
You can also just learn from the best. My buddy and the OG meme marketer Jason Levin has a paid course on how to do memes. The resource are endless.
You can do it brother and sister. Letâs meme our way to success
XP BoostâŦī¸
The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it's so much fun.
I don't exactly know what I'm going to write about today so what I am going to do is just keep putting words down on paper until I start to get some direction.
HUMOR MAKES PEOPLE LIKE YOU. People liking you means theyâre engaged. Which means they stay on your site longer. Which gives you a better chance at getting them to buy what youâre selling.
Cheat Codesđ¤
Looking for good reaction videos? go on Reddit or follow accounts like this one.
If you like someoneâs work, reach out to them via email or DM, and be specific about what you like. You might end up working with them or make a new friend for life.
Posting on LinkedIn to get engagement? Always add a visual. It can be an image or video, but just add it.
Item Shopđ
Mematic: the best meme maker app on mobile. It has meme templates and the insanely useful Free Transform tool to manipulate an image. For example, I fit the Hawk Tuah Girl meme into the Popeâs computer.
Cold Turkey: substitute doomscrolling with language learning with this app made by my friend Gustavo. Itâs still in early stage so try it and give him feedback!
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Until next week.
