Ready to play?🕹️

Happy Friday, internet people!

Our Main Quest this week is something that’s close to my heart, and has supported me through happiness and sadness.

No it’s not my family or friends.

It’s memes.

Main Quest❗️

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 we’re entering a new phase: Entertainment.

With Millennials all getting rich and internet-native Gen-Zers now starting to make good money, we’re 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.

There’s a popular saying that a hideous man can pull a hot girl out of his league if he’s funny (Trust me. Ask my fiancée).

I think it’s the same with brands: there’s an uncapped upside if you can make your audience laugh. It doesn’t 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 that’s human—this is why influencer marketing is absolutely hot right now—and 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

1. Pick a meme first: Choose the meme template first and make a post, not the other way around.

   • Once you pick a meme, you’re 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.

2. 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 steal borrow from them all the time.

   • Some memes are evergreen, but if you want to use old templates, make sure you’ve seen someone or another brand use them successfully.

3. Know what memes to avoid: For instance, no one is using the Good Guy Greg meme anymore. Don’t make your audience call you a boomer.

4. 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, it’s probably shit. If you don’t understand your audience and what your product does for them, you’ll find it hard to come up with good memes.

   • Personally, my rule of thumb is, will the target audience say, “Oh sh*t, this is so true”? If yes, you might have something.

5. Quantity is key: Conan O’Brien used to say that his late-night show was a “volume business”—not 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, it’s 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 I’m happy to help.

“Well, you can do it fast because you’re funny”

I genuinely I think this is something that can be trained. Same with everything, you gotta put your reps in.

“Being funny just doesn’t fit our brand voice”

There’s some truth to this. If you are Oracle or NVIDIA, you might need to consider the holistic picture. But I’d say that’s 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, there’s an opportunity to zig when everyone else zags by using memes. Just look at Porsche:

“We don’t know how to do it”

Hire a social media strategist specializing in creating meme content. There’s tons of them nowadays (disclaimer: I’m 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. Let’s meme our way to success

XP Boost⬆️

Cheat Codes🤑

• Looking for good reaction videos? go on Reddit or follow accounts like this one.

• If you like someone’s 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 Shop🛖

• IdeaWIP: Reddit is the internet source of truth nowadays. IdeaWIP is a tool where you can enter your business idea, and see what people on Reddit thinks about it. Made by the young genius indie hacker Evan Yang.

• 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 Pope’s computer.

• Cold Turkey: substitute doomscrolling with language learning with this app made by my friend Gustavo. It’s still in early stage so try it and give him feedback!

Good Graphics📷

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Until next week.